The technology budget most non-profits are leaving on the table
A meaningful share of what small charities spend on software is avoidable through donation and discount programmes. Finding it is a morning's work, and it funds most of the security you have been putting off.
Non-profit technology conversations tend to start from the wrong end. The question asked is which security measures the organisation can afford to skip. The better question is how much of the current software bill should not be being paid at all.
The major vendors run donation and steep-discount programmes for eligible charities, and the eligibility bar is lower than most small organisations assume. Plenty of the organisations we meet are paying commercial rates for products they qualify to receive free or near-free, usually because nobody ever had the job of checking.
Where to look first
- Productivity and email platforms, where non-profit programmes typically cover a substantial block of user licences.
- The intermediary programmes that validate charitable status once and unlock several vendors at a time.
- Cloud infrastructure credits, if you run anything beyond email and files.
- Security tooling specifically. Several vendors run non-profit pricing that is not advertised on the main pricing page and has to be asked for.
Some real numbers, because these ones are checkable. Google offers a nonprofit edition of Workspace at no cost, and discounts of roughly 70 to 75 per cent on its paid tiers. Microsoft grants up to 300 Business Basic licences and discounts Business Premium by around 75 per cent.
What we will not do is turn that into a percentage of your total technology bill. Licensing is one line of it. Hardware, security tooling, connectivity and the people doing the work are all still there at full price, and a headline figure that quietly ignores them is the kind of number this note exists to argue against.
Programme terms move. Microsoft withdrew some donated grants at renewals from July 2025, and TechSoup stopped handling Microsoft nonprofit validation the following month. If your eligibility was last checked more than a year ago, it is worth checking again.
The problem money does not solve
Volunteers and seasonal staff. Access is granted quickly because someone is needed on Saturday, and removing it afterwards is nobody's specific job. Over a few years an organisation accumulates live accounts belonging to people who have not been involved since a campaign two summers ago.
This is the single most common finding in charitable organisations, it costs nothing to fix, and no licensing programme addresses it. Access that is easy to grant and equally easy to remove is a process decision rather than a purchase.
What the board actually needs
Trustees are increasingly asked about cyber risk and frequently have no answer prepared. What helps is not a technical report. It is three things: what data the organisation holds, what would happen if it were lost or exposed, and what is being done about it, in language a finance trustee can act on.
If donor payment details are processed anywhere in your organisation, find out exactly where before anything else. Card handling obligations are the one area where a small charity carries the same requirements as a retailer.