Recently, Microsoft has been expanding its charitable efforts in a big way. Part of that will have immediate consequences for many of us.

The big picture is that last month, Microsoft established Microsoft Philanthropies, a new organization within the company. Mary Snapp, the organization’s new head, will report directly to Microsoft President Brad Smith.

This month, CEO Satya Nadella announced Microsoft Philanthropies’ first concrete initiatives. The organization, with help from other Microsoft units, will donate $1 billion in Microsoft cloud services to nonprofits and university researchers over the next three years. The goal is to support 70,000 nonprofits through this initiative during that time.

Microsoft is also expanding free and discounted cloud services to universities. In addition, it is going to provide last-mile connectivity to at least 20 projects in 15 countries by the end of 2017.

Nonprofit Pricing

Nonprofits who qualify will be eligible to acquire not only Office 365, which has had nonprofit pricing for two years, but also Microsoft Azure, Enterprise Mobility Suite, Dynamics CRM Online, and Power BI.

Exactly what the nonprofit pricing will be is yet to be announced, in some cases, but we can provide a little help. No changes have been announced for Office 365 nonprofit pricing yet.

Enterprise Mobility Suite, which includes a suite of services to manage security and identity, has just announced nonprofit pricing of $1.65 per user per month. This is a significant decrease from the previously available commercial price of $8.75 per user per month. It includes Azure AD Premium, Microsoft Intune, Azure Rights Management and Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online has had nonprofit pricing for about a year. The Professional package costs $15.00 per user per month (regularly $65), the Basic version is $7.00 per user per month (regularly $30), and the Essentials package costs $3.75 per user per month (regularly $15). We don’t know whether these prices will change with the newly announced initiative.

Microsoft Power BI desktop version has always been free, and Microsoft has not yet announced the nonprofit pricing for Microsoft Power BI Pro. The nonprofit pricing for Azure, which would presumably include processing and data storage in Microsoft’s data centers, is scheduled to be announced this spring.

All of this is really good news. We’ve been using most of these products ourselves, and we like them a lot. We’ve also been helping a lot of clients to adopt them. We’re sure that the nonprofit pricing will greatly benefit a lot of nonprofits, NGOs and foundations in the years ahead. Thank you, Microsoft.