The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator:

Microsoft is on a mission to empower charities with the tools to drive greater social impact through innovation. Microsoft Dynamics 365 is widely used in the charity space for providing organisation-wide management of supporters, fundraising, grants and volunteers; but, until recently, charities have been very reliant on partners to transform the platform into a system that works seamlessly for a Nonprofit.

In November 2018, Microsoft’s dedicated Technology for Social Impact Team announced the release of their Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator: a set of pre-built capabilities and solutions to meet the specific needs of Not-for-Profit organisations. Their goal? To make it simpler for non-profits and their partners to design, embed and adopt these solutions, speeding up their time to value and delivering a consistent approach in line with industry standards.

The Nonprofit Accelerator has been specifically designed to drive non-profit processes, including program delivery, supporter and volunteer management, fundraising and impact measurement. It is powered by a Nonprofit specific version of Microsoft’s Common Data Model, the first common data standard built specifically for the sector.

Using this Nonprofit-specific data model and business processes, the Nonprofit Accelerator caters for scenarios the are unique to the sector: for example, recognising that a contact can have multiple roles simultaneously (supporter, volunteer and member etc.)

Entities and fields have been renamed, repurposed or created to achieve this, and the result is a relevant yet extensible starting point for a Nonprofit CRM system.

Since its original launch in November 2018, Microsoft has doubled the Common Data Model entity set from 35 to 75. Version 2, released in April 2019, features 1,400 attributes, from data elements to relationships to best practices. Microsoft is dedicated to further enhancing the Accelerator and Common Data Model to incorporate new capabilities and standards in line with industry requirements.

At Pythagoras, our mission is to give charities the tools they need to do more good. We’ve welcomed the introduction of the Nonprofit Accelerator, as it provides our expert Not-for-Profit consultants with a comprehensive framework with which to build innovative solutions for our customers. Wherever there is a close synergy between our customer’s requirements and the Nonprofit Accelerator, we incorporate it into our project approach. We are currently delivering multiple successful projects for charities and membership organisations using the framework.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the Nonprofit Accelerator or our approach to projects in this sector, you can get in touch with Pythagoras at info@pythagoras.co.uk or on 01628 519 000.