Microsoft Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator v3.0.3.0

In partnership with our Customer Steering Team and partner community, Microsoft continues to evolve the Common Data Model for Nonprofits and Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator. Our December 2020 release (v3.0) marks the sixth significant release of these solutions since November 2018. This release paves new ground for nonprofits in the critical areas of assessment management, volunteer management, and frontline operations, and includes the following value and capabilities:

1. Our Assessment Management CDM extensions, sample app and sample data provide partners with a foundation to enable frontline workers to accurately, consistently, rapidly and efficiently record detailed observations and answer the “who,” “where,” “what,” “how,” and “when” questions critical to delivering frontline services. These investments allow disaster organizations to evaluate damage and assess on-the-ground needs to enable easier coordinated field response. The assessment management extensions support nonprofit program and beneficiary management and can be leveraged in tandem with the program management and case management data schema already included in the Common Data Model for Nonprofits.

2. Convened by NetHope, the Frontline Humanitarian Logistics (FHL) initiative was created to reduce the time and cost involved in implementing IT solutions within humanitarian supply chains and encourage interoperability of data, service delivery, and systems across the sector. NetHope convened a cross-sector group of 24 collaborating academic, public, and private sector organizations which resulted in the development of a Frontline Humanitarian Logistics Data Standard. With this release, we align item requests, types, and groups to that standard to ease collaborating nonprofits’ disaster response and guarantee faster delivery of needed items. The Frontline Humanitarian Logistics data schema also provides nonprofits and partners with the foundation to provide donors with exact information about what items are in demand, where funded supplies were delivered, and the direct impact made to beneficiaries. This ability to report back on donor impact is critical at this time of increased demand for transparency.

3. The Frontline Humanitarian Logistics Mapping Guide provides guidance to nonprofits and partners on how to put the NetHope convened and sector-developed Frontline Humanitarian Logistics Data Standard into practice. This Guide maps the FHL Data Standard to the Common Data Model for Nonprofits to support organizations who align to these valuable industry standards.

4. Additional volunteer management extensions to the CDM for Nonprofits will aid partners in building affordable solutions for nonprofits at a time when recruiting and retaining critical volunteers is essential. Organizations can track and recruit for a broad range of engagement opportunities, while volunteers themselves can align their time, talents, and qualifications with available volunteer opportunities. The new volunteer data extensions remove any dependency on Dynamics Project Service Automation (PSA). Now partners can build directly on PowerApps to lower the total cost of ownership to support volunteer engagement.

5. Streamlined Nonprofit Accelerator Architecture: As we continue to rapidly scale the Nonprofit Accelerator, we seek ways to increase friction-free innovation among our partner community. In line with this goal, we have brought all Nonprofit Accelerator data packages (with the exception of the IATI data standard package) into the Nonprofit Core data schema layer. Streamlining data packages into a single Core package reduces dependencies on additional platform licenses, eliminates the tax of introducing additional data schema packages, ensures that partners have a one-stop shop for extending all CDM for Nonprofit data schema.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator v2.3.3.0

In partnership with our Customer Steering Team, partner community, Microsoft continues to evolve the Common Data Model for Nonprofits and Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator. Our June 2020 release (v2.3) marks the fifth significant release of these solutions since November 2018. This release paves new ground for nonprofits in the critical areas of case management, project management and program design, and operations, and includes the following value and capabilities:

1. Critical Case Management extensions to the CDM for Nonprofits, along with a Sample App and sample data to provide partners with building blocks to support case and program workers as demand for their social services rises. These investments will aid case workers in managing beneficiaries from first contact through a tailored program experience and to the finish line relating cases to future service needs and program outcomes.
2. Complete Project Management and Program Design delivery framework that tracks project activities and progress to specific theories of change. This framework raises the bar for program officers to consistently deliver programs aligned to indicators and objectives, budgets, and results. These enhancements include CDM for Nonprofits extensions, a Sample App, and sample data.
3. Essential operations for small nonprofits comes in the form of Nonprofit Operations Toolkit, a model-driven Power App that brings organizations managing their projects, budgets, awards, cost centers, and time and expense into modernity by helping them to streamline and automate heavy manual finance and operations workloads.
4. Streamlined Nonprofit Accelerator Architecture: As we continue to rapidly scale the Nonprofit Accelerator, we seek ways to drive friction-free innovation among our partner community. In line with this goal, we have brought the Case Management and Project Management & Program Design entity and attribute extensions into the Nonprofit Core data schema layer (to eliminate the tax of introducing additional data schema packages), ensuring that partners have a one-stop shop for extending all CDM for Nonprofits data schema. In addition, we have decoupled the Accelerator Sample Apps into their own solution package to aid partners who want to get straight to the schema in order to develop fast.
5. Continuous improvements to all release assets with a focus on simplifying and streamlining where possible. New and refreshed assets include a Nonprofit Operations Toolkit Administration Guide and Demo Script, user friendly GitHub read.me files, upgrade guide to provide instructions to take advantage of architectural improvements, and updated references to our new Common Data Model for Nonprofits Sample Apps solution package.

Notice: The package deployer has been updated and a nonprofitcore_base solution has been added. The new package deployer will prompt the user to install the NonprofitCore_Base.zip package into their environment. The NonprofitCore_Base.zip is an empty solution and is in place to provide stability to the solution in your environment and to allow architecture packages to be shared in common across nonprofit solutions published by Tech for Social Impact. It should have no impact on any data or packages currently in your environment.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator v2.2.3.1

In partnership with its Customer Steering Team and partner community, Microsoft continues to rapidly evolve the Nonprofit Common Data Model and Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator. The initial release of v2.2 happened November 22, 2019 (v2.2.3.0) and on January 27, 2020, Microsoft released iteration v2.2.3.1. This release paves new ground for nonprofit program officers and our partners ecosystem and includes the following program design and delivery functionality:

1. A Program Design template application that nonprofit program officers will use to populate logframes (logical frameworks), design programs, select indicator sets like the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and monitor and evaluate program outcomes.

2. A framework that enables program and country officers to design individual programs with known standards, based on internal indicator sets or external standards like the UN SDGs.

3. A workflow that fosters collaboration with colleagues and external partner organizations alike, via Teams, Office 365, and Power Automate.

4. Custom theming and extensible reviewer and approver workflows.

5. Increased ability to track and report on outputs, outcomes and impact by aligning the Nonprofit Common Data Model and Nonprofit Accelerator to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) including a connector to the SDG Goal, Target and Indicator library.

6. Increased transparency and shared learning from program design by extending the Nonprofit Common Data Model with new common Indicator Library entities including measurement item, measurement item relationship and measurement item usage.

7. Indicator Library entities incorporated directly into the Program Design template application.

8. New documentation including how-to guides, user guide, walk through guide and sample data.

9. Improved interoperability of ecosystem solutions by supporting partners aligning their solutions with the Nonprofit Common Data Model and Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator v2.1.3.0

Microsoft continues to partner with a globally diverse Customer Steering Team of nonprofit organizations and with partners to evolve the Nonprofit Accelerator. They announced General Availability of version 2.1 of the Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator in August 2019, and it includes:

• 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
• Improved sample 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 to develop 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 that is not dependent on Dynamics 365
• New documentation including how-to guides, user guides, 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

Review the "NFP Accelerator 2.1 - Package Deployer Guide.pdf" to start installing the Nonprofit Accelerator 2.1.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator v2.1.0.0 [Public Preview]

Microsoft continues to partner with a globally diverse Customer Steering Team of nonprofit organizations and with partners to evolve the Nonprofit Accelerator. In July 2019, they created version 2.1 of the Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator. The focus of the v2.1 release includes:

• 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
• Extensions of the common data model for Beneficiary Management for improved nonprofit program delivery, results and impact insights
• Improved sample 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 to develop 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 that is not dependent on
• New documentation including how-to guides, user guides, 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

Review the "NFP Accelerator 3.0 - Package Deployer Guide.pdf" to start installing the Nonprofit Accelerator 2.1 (PREVIEW)

Accelerator 2.1 (PREVIEW)

• Note, the v2.1 Public Preview release has also been referred to as v3.0 in some of the documents and artifacts. The scope of these two version numbers are the same and clarity on the release number will be resolved when the release is General Availability.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator 2.0

Microsoft has continued to partner with a globally diverse Customer Steering Team and partners and in March 2019 created version 2 of the Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator.  The focus of the v2 release includes:

• Improving the flow of funds through the Common Data Model by connecting Fundraising to Program Delivery
• Establishing a common data model for Beneficiary management by linking Program Delivery and Constituent components of the model
• Extending the accelerator's alignment to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Organization and Activity Standards
• Enabling membership management by extending the CDM with Membership entities
• Improving constituent engagement by extending the CDM with Volunteer preferences, skills and availability
• Improved documentation, how-to guides, sample data and mapping templates to industry leading solutions
• Improving interoperability of ecosystem solutions by supporting partners who are aligning their solutions with the Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator and Common Data Model for Nonprofits

 
The version 2 release includes new entities and data attributes in the Common Data Model for Nonprofits, enhancements to the sample application, updated sample data, and documentation.