Church and Nonprofit IT in Tulsa: The Free Licensing Changed, and Four Other Things Worth Knowing

Most organizations shopping for IT services for churches in Tulsa are not shopping at all yet. They are a volunteer with a question. Someone who is good with computers, helps out on a Sunday, and has ended up holding the passwords to the email system, the giving platform and the Wi-Fi.

That works until it doesn’t. And the thing that most often forces the issue right now is not a crash or a breach. It is a licensing change that happened quietly in 2025 and that a lot of organizations still have not noticed.

The free Microsoft licensing you think you have probably changed

For years, eligible nonprofits could get ten Microsoft 365 Business Premium licenses granted at no cost. A lot of churches built their whole setup on that, including the security features that came with it.

Microsoft retired the Business Premium and Office 365 E1 grants on 1 July 2025. Organizations that had already renewed kept theirs for the rest of that commitment, which is why the change has been slow to show up. As those commitments run out, the renewal looks different.

What Microsoft still offers eligible nonprofits is a donation of up to 300 Business Basic licenses, plus discounts of up to around 75 percent on Business Premium and E1. The discounted Business Premium rate has been running near $5.50 per user per month on an annual commitment, according to Microsoft’s own nonprofit pricing. Those figures move, so check them at that source rather than taking them from an article, including this one.

The part that catches people out is that Business Basic is not a smaller Business Premium. It covers email and the browser versions of Word and Excel. It does not include the desktop apps, and it does not include the device management and threat protection features that Business Premium carries. An organization that drops from Premium to Basic to stay inside a budget has also quietly dropped a layer of security, usually without anyone writing that decision down.

If your renewal is coming up, the question worth asking is not “what is cheapest” but “which of these features were we actually relying on”.

Google Workspace is still free, with a verification step

For organizations holding valid 501(c)(3) status, Google Workspace for Nonprofits remains free. Eligibility is normally confirmed through TechSoup, which wants your EIN and your IRS determination letter, and verification typically takes between two and fourteen business days.

It is not a fit for everyone. Government bodies, hospitals and schools are excluded from that program, and moving an established email system between platforms is real work rather than a switch you flip. But for a nonprofit starting fresh, or one facing a Microsoft renewal it cannot absorb, it belongs on the list of options.

Volunteer turnover is the security problem nobody logs

Staff turnover at a business is a process. Someone tells HR, an account gets disabled, a laptop comes back. Volunteer turnover is a conversation that trails off.

What we find, over and over, is a shared login. One account for the office computer, one password for the giving platform, given to whoever needs it, never changed when they stop helping. Nobody is being careless; it is simply the fastest way to get a volunteer productive on a Saturday morning.

The fix is unglamorous. Individual accounts rather than shared ones, a list of who has access to what, and a habit of closing accounts when someone moves on. It costs nothing but attention, and it is the single change that most reduces the chance of an unpleasant surprise.

Your giving records are the sensitive data

Churches and nonprofits often assume they hold nothing worth stealing. They hold giving histories, member contact details and, through a donation platform, a path to payment information. That combination is exactly what someone would want.

Two questions are worth answering plainly. Where does your member and giving data actually live, and who can get to it? And if the machine or the account holding it stopped working tomorrow, what would you still have? Backups of a donor database are easy to assume and surprisingly often absent. Our cybersecurity work tends to start with those two questions rather than with any product.

The finance mailbox is a target, specifically

Fraud aimed at churches and nonprofits usually arrives as an email, not as malware. A message that appears to come from a pastor or a director, asking a bookkeeper to move money or buy gift cards, timed for a week when the sender is known to be travelling. It works because the request sounds plausible and the person receiving it wants to be helpful.

Multi-factor authentication on the accounts that touch money is the practical defence, along with a standing rule that any payment request arriving by email gets confirmed by phone. Neither is expensive. The phone rule costs nothing at all, and it has stopped more of these than any piece of software.

Wi-Fi and streaming in a building that was not built for them

A sanctuary is a hard room for wireless. Thick walls, a lot of open space, and a congregation that all reaches for a phone at the same moment. Meanwhile the livestream needs steady upload bandwidth on a connection that was probably sold on its download speed.

Most streaming complaints we look at in Tulsa churches turn out to be upload capacity or a single access point trying to cover a room it cannot, not the camera or the streaming service. Worth knowing before replacing equipment that was never the problem.

Where to start

If you are the volunteer holding all of this, the useful first step is not buying anything. It is writing down what you have: which accounts exist, who can reach the giving data, when the licensing renews, and what would happen if the one person who understands the setup were unavailable for a month.

That document is worth more than most purchases, and it makes any conversation with an IT provider a short one. We do this for churches and nonprofits around Tulsa as a starting point, and organizations are welcome to do it themselves.