To get a nonprofit rate for software, try asking your vendor

If you want to get the bargain prices on software that are offered to nonprofit organizations by two outfits that specialize in doing so, try asking your computer vendor for the same deals.

My church recently ordered several computers from Dell. I told our tech guy doing the ordering about Consistent Computer Bargains, who has great prices for NPOs on lots of software.

He did more research and found that those same prices are offered on specific SKUs for Microsoft software.

We asked the Dell representative about those prices. Said representative hadn’t heard of that, and after checking with a supervisor to learn it was available, included those special prices in the bid.

I understand that those prices for NPOs are available from other vendors as well. 

If you are ordering a number of machines from one of the big vendors, ask about getting the software with special pricing for NPOs, which is called the Microsoft Open License for Charities. You can find the list of resellers here.

You will probably have to insist on the pricing. You may even have to go look up the specialized  SKU numbers. That would be understandable, because most of the sales reps deal with business organizations instead of nonprofits, so it makes perfectly good sense they would not be aware of that special deal.

So ask, if you are discussing a package deal. Could save you some valuable ministry dollars.

Could also save a lot of time by having the vendor install the software instead of having to install it yourself after ordering it from another vendor.

When our team looked at the software licenses, we found an added bonus.  For two years the software licenses allows us to upgrade to any new releases of any software we obtained. That means we can get any new releases at no charge.

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