Today marks a landmark day for the Finish Line Blog. Today is our 200th post! Thank you all for following along! Whether today is the first post you’ve read or the two hundredth, I thank you, and hope you’ve found our Blog informative and entertaining at the same time. We try to do both. Try is the key word. Without further adieu, we bring you the topic of today’s post: Office 365. You probably know that this is Microsoft’s subscription service to bring Office to the masses, but do you know that non-profits can receive it at an incredible discount? We’ll tell you how.
If you’ve read a fair amount of my Blog, you’re aware of the fact that I never promote the idea of paying for Microsoft Office 365. Microsoft tries to sell the subscription as “you’ll always have the most up-to-date version of Office if you subscribe to Office 365”. For one thing, who really cares? A new version of Office is released every three years, and my mantra is to purchase a new computer every five years. Unless you’re an Office snob (do any of those actually exist?), most of us can wait until our next computer to get the newest offering from Microsoft. The final decision comes down to, as always, sheer numbers. An Office 365 subscription for one user costs $69.99 per year, or $6.99 per month. A subscription for up to six users costs $99.99 per year of $9.99 per month. With either plan, you’ll receive every program that comes with Office. By comparison, you can buy one license of Microsoft Office Home and Student 2019 for $149.99, Microsoft Office Home and Business 2019 for $249.99, or Microsoft Office Professional 2019 for $439.99. These are one time fees, with prices listed on Microsoft’s website. Good luck finding them, as they keep them pretty well hidden. You’d need to buy Professional in order to get every program offered as part of the subscription service, but most people don’t need every single program anyhow. There are business plans for Office 365 as well, with Office 365 Business priced at $8.99 per user per month, or Office 365 Business Premium for $12.50 per user per month. If you stop paying for your subscription, you’ll no longer have access to Office’s programs on your computer.
As you know from prior posts, I do a lot of work for churches in my area. Through this experience, I was turned on to a non-profit plan for Google’s G Suite as discussed in “How ‘Suite’ it is To Be a Non-Profit”. This year one of my churches was due to purchase new computers. Of course, we needed to buy Microsoft Office to go with the new computers. In an office of four people, we were looking at around $900 just for Microsoft Office. That’s a large chunk of the technology budget right there. An alternative was brought to my attention: Office 365 Nonprofit. Non-profits have two options: Office 365 Nonprofit Business Essentials, or Office 365 Nonprofit Business Premium. Office 365 Nonprofit Business Essentials is very basic, and includes only services for Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, Skype for Business, and Microsoft Teams. Office 365 Nonprofit Business Premium on the other hand has everything: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, Access, and the same services as Office 365 Nonprofit Business Essentials. Here’s the kicker: Office 365 Nonprofit Business Essentials can be your’s for a donation, or Office 365 Nonprofit Business Premium will run you $3.00 per user per month. For that price, I made an exception and went against my principles and applied for the Office 365 Nonprofit Business Premium which would cost the church $12 per month. We were accepted. If you represent a non-profit organization and would like to enjoy these same benefits, click here to begin the application. We provided our tax exemption form as proof of non-profit status.
When it comes to dollars and cents, only you can decide what makes sense! For a small non-profit, Office 365 Nonprofit makes an awful lot of sense. It’s a lot easier to swing these monthly payments than dump a ton of money all at once. Oh, one more thing: if you’re a large non-profit, you have three tiers of Microsoft services available to you: Office 365 Nonprofit E1, Office 365 Nonprofit E3, or Office 365 Nonprofit E5. Products and prices vary.