Microsoft Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator v2.1 is now in General Availability

Microsoft is committed helping ISVs quickly create applications that better meet the unique needs of different industries. As we announced in July 2019, we’ve continued to work with industry experts to provide pre-built dashboards, workflows, and sample data that align to the common industry scenarios, including launching additional accelerators.

Microsoft continues to partner with a globally diverse Customer Steering Team of nonprofit organizations and with partners to evolve the Nonprofit Accelerator. And we are excited to announce that our latest version of the accelerator, version 2.1, has been released to General Availability.

This latest version aims to cut costs and boost efficiencies for nonprofits through increased data transparency, streamlined implementation of solutions and increased interoperability across systems. This release extends existing capabilities that enable core nonprofit processes such as program delivery, fundraising, and volunteer management.

Here are specific details included in v2.1 of the Nonprofit Accelerator:

• Increased data transparency across Customer Engagement (CE) and Finance & Operations (F&O) workloads by leveraging the Power Platform to deliver partner-ready Data Integrator Templates for connecting CE to F&O for standard nonprofit use cases
• Improved data quality and cross-sector data transparency by leveraging the Power Platform Flow Templates to connect to the industry standard IATI codelist framework and enabling publishing of IATI Organization and Activity XML files from the Nonprofit Accelerator
• Extensions of the common data model for Beneficiary Management for improved nonprofit program delivery, results and impact insights
• Enhanced model-driven applications for constituent management, fundraising, awards and delivery frameworks including form and sample data updates and new program delivery dashboard templates
• Deeper integration with ISVs developing solutions that incorporate the Nonprofit Common Data Model without a dependency on Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales and Marketing by adding a new solution layer dependent only on Microsoft's Common Data Service
• New documentation including how-to guides, user guides, solution walk through, sample data and mapping templates
• Improved interoperability of ecosystem solutions by supporting partners who are aligning their solutions with the Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator and Common Data Model for Nonprofits

We have also continued to improve the solution package options and resources available to partners to leverage the Nonprofit Accelerator.  The solutions have been extracted in the GitHub repository and all Nonprofit Accelerator assets (managed/un-managed solutions, sample data packages, reference documents, SDK extension, Flow Templates, CDM Folder Model templates, etc.) are packaged into a release. 

This release includes new data and data attributes in the Common Data Model for Nonprofits, enhancements to the sample applications, updated sample data, new templates and documentation as highlighted below. For more information, see NFP Accelerator 2.1 - Release Notes.docx on GitHub.

Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and Finance & Operations integration

With this release, the accelerator provides guidance on how to integrate data from the Nonprofit Accelerator in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE) to Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations (F&O) by connecting data from CE to corresponding data entities in F&O using the Microsoft Data Integrator (DI) process.​ This enables nonprofits benefit from an integrated Microsoft solution set that has the potential to power their end-to-end operations and manage their financials in Finance & Operations. 

For more information, see NFP Accelerator 2.1 - NFP to F&O Mapping.xlsx and NFP Accelerator 2.1 - CE to F&O Integration User Guide.docx on GitHub.

IATI Standard

IATI is a global initiative to improve the transparency of development and humanitarian resources and their results to address poverty and crises. IATI brings together governments, multilateral institutions, private sector and civil society organizations and others to increase the transparency of resources flowing into developing countries.  IATI encourages all organizations that distribute or spend resources to publish information about their development and humanitarian activities to use IATI’s data standard, which is a set of rules and guidance to ensure information is easy to access, understand and use.

The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator (with the IATI add-on) is developed based on IATI version 2.03.  This includes IATI data entities, attributes and processes to enable nonprofits to track and report program activities according to the IATI Standard. This release includes non-embedded codelist synchronization, IATI XML file export functionality, Activity Standard enhancements, new CDM data entities, and enhancements to IATI’s sample apps.

For more information, see NFP Accelerator 2.1 – IATI Metadata Reference.xlsx, IATI User Guide.docx,  and NFP Accelerator 2.1 – Nonprofit IATI and Volunteer Solution ERD.pdf on GitHub.

Beneficiary Management

The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator enables nonprofit organizations to create and track profiles for Benefit Recipients. As part of this release, a new “Resource Catalog” has been added as an entity to take into account the types of benefit recipients that are not a Contact or Account – i.e. an animal, a forest or an ocean.  This enables improved nonprofit program delivery, results, and impact insights by directly connecting beneficiaries, program activities and indicator values. 

Volunteer Management

The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator enables nonprofit organizations to track a volunteer’s skills, preferences, schedule and with this release a way to store information of interest for the organizations used to evaluate the eligibility of a volunteer and the work schedules for specific tasks.

For more information, see NFP Accelerator 2.1 - Volunteer Management Metadata Reference.xlsx and NFP Accelerator 2.1 - Nonprofit IATI and Volunteer Solution ERD.pdf on GitHub.

Sample Apps

As part of this release, there are improved model-driven applications for constituent management, fundraising, awards and delivery frameworks including form and sample data updates and new program delivery dashboard templates. This includes the following Model Driven Apps to improve navigation of targeted use cases within the Nonprofit Accelerator:

• Administration
• Awards
• Constituents
• Delivery Framework
• Fundraising
• Volunteer Management
• IATI

The NFP 2.1 Accelerator 2.1 Walk Through.docx on GitHub can be referenced for a guided end-to-end tour of the Nonprofit Accelerator. 

Common Data Model for Nonprofits

Partners and nonprofit organizations can build Canvas, Model Driven and Dynamics 365 apps using the Common Data Model for Nonprofits. For the full list of the data entities and data attributes, see the NFP Accelerator v2.1 - Nonprofit Reference document on GitHub or the Visual Entity Navigator. Below is a summary of the data entities and data attributes available:

This release includes the following CDM changes:

• 8 Data entities – 3 Nonprofit, 4 IATI, 1 Volunteer Management
• 48 Nonprofit and IATI data attributes 

The total number of data entities and data attributes that are part of the Common Data Model for Nonprofits includes: 

• 83 Data entities – 37 Nonprofit, 29 IATI, 1 Volunteer Management, and 16 extensions to existing CDS Core and First Party Application Data entities
• 1,300+ Nonprofit and IATI data attributes 

Solution Options

There are multiple capabilities that can be leveraged in the Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator for partners to build applications. They include:

• Constituent management 
• Donation management
• Fundraising
• Grants/Awards management
• Program delivery
• Aligning beneficiaries to program delivery
• Aligning funds to results framework
• Volunteer management
• Membership management
• IATI processes

Depending on the partner and organization needs, the Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator can be implemented in multiple ways with dependencies to consider with each solution. These solution packages can be referenced on GitHub. The solution packages options include:

• NonprofitCore – This contains the essentials for the nonprofit accelerator including views, forms and data entities and has no dependency on Microsoft Dynamics 365 and is only dependent on Microsoft’s Common Data Service.
• NonprofitSales – This solution contains the additions to the Nonprofit Core solution that leverage Dynamics 365 Sales module, including campaign, lead, opportunity and product. This solution depends on:
  • Nonprofit Accelerator - NonprofitCore and NonprofitSales solution packages
  • Dynamics 365 modules – Dynamics Sales 
• MicrosoftDynamics365VolunteerManagement – This solution contains additions to the NonprofitCore and NonprofitSales solutions and leverages Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation (PSA) to support volunteer management scenarios. This solution depends on:
  • Nonprofit Accelerator – NonprofitCore, NonprofitSales, and MicrosoftDynamics365Volunteer Management solution packages
  • Dynamics 365 modules – Dynamics Sales and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation (PSA)
• MicrosoftDynamics365IATI – This solution additions to the NonprofitCore and NonprofitSales solutions to improve the IATI compliance, including: IATI xml file export and the non-embedded sync process features. This solution depends on:
  • Nonprofit Accelerator – NonprofitCore and NonprofitSales solution packages
  • Dynamics 365 modules – Dynamics Sales

For more information, on GitHub reference the following:

• NFP Accelerator 2.1 - Nonprofit Reference.docx
• NFP Accelerator 2.1 - Core Metadata Reference.xlsx
• NFP Accelerator 2.1 – Anchor Metadata Reference.xlsx
• NFP Accelerator 2.1 – IATI Metadata Reference.xlsx
• NFP Accelerator 2.1 – Volunteer Management Metadata Reference.xlsx
• To install the solutions, see the NFP Accelerator 2.1 – Package Deployer Guide.docx and .zip files in GitHub.

Continuing with our effort to accelerate your data integration projects and align with the Microsoft Common Data Model, we have also published the Nonprofit Common Data Model as a JSON file that can be used to create CDM folders in Azure Data Lake Storage gen2. The nonprofit template (model.json) along with the Common Data Model Folder Setup Instructions can be found in GitHub.

Documentation is located on GitHub.