Microsoft currently has a nonprofit software donations program set up to help nonprofits gain access to the latest and greatest software from Microsoft. This program is available in over 100 countries across the world and since 1998 over $3.9 billion worth of software has been donated. Of that, Windows has accounted for nearly $450 million worth of donations.

Today, we are announcing some updates to this program that further benefit nonprofits seeking Microsoft software products and I’d like to talk through those updates.

• The number of Microsoft software products (e.g. Windows, Office, etc.) that can be requested has been expanded from 6 to 10. This means that nonprofits can now request up to a total of 10 different Microsoft products. 50 licenses of each product can be requested. A maximum of 500 licenses total can be given to a nonprofit of Microsoft software.

What these means is that any nonprofit that is eligible for the program can upgrade 50 PCs to Windows 7, order 50 copies of Office 2010, 50 CALs for Exchange Server and so forth and outfit their entire organization with the latest Microsoft software. That’s pretty slick!

• 3 new categories of nonprofit organizations are now eligible for the nonprofit software donations program. These are medical research organizations, private foundations, and amateur sports and recreational organizations.

If a nonprofit belongs to these new categories they can now take part in our program and request software for their organizations.

• To help nonprofits ensure their existing PCs are running genuine versions of Windows, the nonprofit software donations program now includes a Get Genuine offering. We want to help make sure nonprofits are legal and of course keeping their software up-to-date.

Nonprofits with existing PCs that meet certain Get Genuine requirements can request full copies of Windows for those PCs to “get genuine”.

These are exciting changes to the program we hope nonprofits will enjoy! For more on these changes, see this blog post from the Microsoft Unlimited Potential Blog! I also recommend watching the below video!

Let your favorite nonprofit organization know about our program! We’ve also created some text that you can use to reach out to nonprofit organizations to let them know of our program!