Free Office 365 Licences!

If you squadron is registered for Gift Aid, then you are probably eligible for some free Office 365 licences from Microsoft.

Microsoft will offer you 10 Office 365 Business Premium licences, which include desktop versions of all the popular Office apps (like Word and PowerPoint) and as many Office 365 E1 licences as you need (these are the same licences all staff get within with the RAFAC, with online apps only).

All licences come with up to 5TB per user OneDrive access, email accounts and Teams access.

The process to get these licences is relatively straightforward, but there are a few steps you need to go through to get them. More information about it all is here: Microsoft 365 Nonprofit Solutions | Microsoft Nonprofits

I showed them the letter we got when we registered for Gift Aid, which was proof enough for Microsoft that we were a charity.

You will need somebody reasonably proficient in IT to manage the account once they are set up, using an online dashboard. It will also help if you have a squadron website, as they use the domain name at the end of the email address. For example, joebloggs@1234squadron.co.uk

If you need any help getting set up drop me a message or post a comment here. :slight_smile:

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Brill.
Thanks for the info.

Hi,

I’m reassured that someone has made this work! How did you get to talk to a real person to show them your evidence? I can’t get past the registration page without a charity registration number (I have an excepted charity number which works for gift aid, but isn’t recognised by Microsoft).

Cheers!

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When your squadron signed up for Gift Aid you should have had a letter that had a HMRC Charities reference number on it. Microsoft accepted this as a valid charity number with a scanned copy of the letter. Hope this helps! On the dropdown, during the registration process, choose HMRC instead of Charity Commission for England and Wales.

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Appreciate this is an old thread but the offer above appears to have been withdrawn.

The option now being promoted is a Microsoft 365 subscription which has a per user per month (£2.30 which isn’t unreasonable).

But we don’t work per user, staff have access to MS 365 anyway but what I want is Office for the PCs cadet NCOs use for instructing. We don’t want staff to have to sign in to their Bader Microsoft accounts.

Any other suggestions? We are using LibreOffice for now but it has its limitations.

Charities get free Google Suite licences.

Obviously not ideal to split between MS & Google ecosystems, but it’s workable.

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I don’t mind paying, but the perpetual licences for the Office suite, at £120 each, are rather steep (we’d need 3).

But it looks like the not for profits package is now only the subscription.

I believe cadets will be getting their own personal account (but not currently email) which will give them access to Teams for Education and Office online, etc.

That is indeed the plan, although no timescales have been published, and that will rely on cadets logging into their accounts.

That will help but it does mean they will need their log ins and 2FA working.

We have a couple of laptops we use for training and the whole log in with a Microsoft account is a pain. I’d much prefer to just have them as shared resources, without the need to log on, which is why I was looking at the perpetual licences rather than M365.

These are not used for Bader. Just for PowerPoints etc.