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.