Next in my blog series on I take at the various industry clouds that are readily available to deploy as part of the Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Microsoft 365 deployment. These industry clouds are a massive leap forward from the traditional "accelerators" that we may seen or deployed in the past. The historical accelerators came with a detailed common data model, but not much in the form of actual functionality.
The new industry clouds solution, however come with that same detailed common data model, but also now provide actual user functionality, integrations with Microsoft 365 and even Power Bi visualisations in some cases.
Overview
The industry clouds currently available for deployment are as follows,
Nonprofit - Provide nonprofit customers with a deeper understanding of their donors and supporters. Enhance their fundraising capabilities by aligning program needs with personalized supporter engagements.
Financial services - Manage loyalty and profitability for financial services organizations. Boost productivity through enhanced workflows and improved employee experiences and help clients combat financial crime with the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services
Healthcare - Empower healthcare customers with enhanced patient engagement and personalized experiences at every point of care. Help organizations boost collaboration by connecting, engaging, and managing their teams with industry-leading solutions.
Manufacturing - Help manufacturing customers digitally empower their workforce by reskilling workers and enabling new digital experiences.
Retail - Help your retail customers get more value from their data by unifying data sources across the shopper journey.
In this article I am going to cover the deployment of and the functionality within the Microsoft Industry Cloud for Non Profit, or MC4N for short.
First step in the process is to access the deployment centre at, Microsoft Cloud Solution Center.
From here we access the Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit, where we will see the various components. I will provide an overview of these components later in the article.
At this, from a deployment perspective we do need to take time to ensure we have the appropriate licenses in place. The MC4N requires the following for complete deployment
Dynamics 365 Sales license - Essential or Premium
Dynamics 365 Marketing (Customer Insights Journeys) license
Microsoft 365 License of any kind
Power Bi Premium license
There are a number of permissions, security roles and other pre-requisites, all of kind are contained within the following article, Overview of deploying Fundraising and Engagement - Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit | Microsoft Learn
Deploy
But let us assume we have all the necessary prerequisites in place and we are ready to deploy. The simplest way to do this is through the Solution Center linked above. We simply tick the boxes of the elements we need to deploy.
It is worth mentioning that elements can be deployed standalone, there is no requirement or dependencies on the various parts of the solution. For example, if you don't have Power Bi licenses you can still deploy the fundraising and engagement app.
Once you have selected your modules, simply hit Deploy. The process will now go and deploy your solutions. This can takes upwards of an hour to complete.
Select the various solutions, and point to your environment,
Give your deployment a name you will remember,
Once complete you will see a screen similar to the below,
Test our Solutions
Now our solutions are installed we can access our environment and test out the new functionality. The key functions we now have available to us are as follows,
Fundraising and Engagement Model Driven App
Volunteer Management Model Driven App
Volunteer Engagement Power Pages Portal
Teams Template Channel
SharePoint Template Library
SharePoint Template Library
The template SharePoint library is a relatively simple concept and is presenting purely as a template to build from, as appose to a complete solution.
Teams Template Channel
The template Teams channel is similar to the SharePoint library in that its purely a template to further customise, but could just as easily be created manually.
Fundraising and Engagement Model Driven App
The Fundraising and Engagement App is probably the most conclusive part of the overall industry cloud. It provides users with functionality to track now only Accounts and Contacts, but also all the donation history attached to them, as well as
Out of the box dashboards provide details of all fundraising activities, donations provided and designations allocated too,
Volunteer Management Model Driven App
The Volunteer Management App and associated Volunteer Engagement portal provide a conclusive end to end Volunteer management solution. The model driven app allows volunteer managers to create engagements/events that volunteers can register for.
These opportunities are then published to the portal for volunteers to register. These registrations then come back into the model driven app for processing and onboarding.
Dashboards are used to easily keep of volunteer opportunities and the volunteers who register via the portal,
Volunteer Engagement Power Pages Portal
The Volunteer Engagement Power Pages Portal provides a very detailed portal site that can of course be customised with company logo and brand.
The site itself provides pages for profiles, engagement opportunities, engagement registration and
You can easily search for Volunteer opportunities and then find more details before applying and selecting the time slot that works for you as a volunteer. This request is then forwarded to the Volunteer Management team who pick the request up and work through any necessary pre-checks and onboarding activities.
Hope you all enjoyed this post on the Microsoft Industry Cloud for Non Profit. I will continue this series with some additional content specifically related to the other industry clouds available from Microsoft and how they work with other aspects of the Power Platform. Take Care, and Speak Soon!
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