Nonprofits in the study reported three core challenges that Microsoft 365 Copilot helps them rethink:

• Resource constraints. Many nonprofits are “always under-resourced compared to the ambitions of the organization.” Limited budgets and donor expectations about low overhead make it hard to hire enough staff. Copilot helps existing teams do more with the same headcount by:
  • Drafting and responding to emails.
  • Summarizing meeting notes and action items.
  • Creating first drafts of documents, presentations, and reports.
• Information overload. Staff were spending “far too much time” searching through navigation panes and SharePoint pages to find documents. Copilot sits inside familiar tools like Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Loop, and Whiteboard and:
  • Surfaces relevant documents and data with natural-language prompts.
  • Summarizes long documents and threads so staff can get to the point faster.
• Shadow AI and security risks. Leaders knew staff were already using free genAI tools and “didn’t know what they were uploading,” creating data and security risks. Copilot helps by:
  • Keeping data in a closed Microsoft 365 ecosystem instead of sending it over the open internet.
  • Ensuring organizational data is not used to train public AI models.
  • Prompting nonprofits to improve data governance as part of deployment.

In practice, this means staff spend less time on repetitive work and searching for information, and more time on mission-oriented activities, strategic thinking, and creative program or fundraising work.

The Forrester study modeled a composite nonprofit with 500 employees and $70 million in annual gross receipts and projected the impact of Microsoft 365 Copilot over three years.

Projected financial outcomes (three-year, risk-adjusted):

• High-impact scenario: about $2.8M net present value (NPV) and a projected ROI of 316%.
• Mid-impact scenario: about $1.6M NPV and a projected ROI of 185%.
• Low-impact scenario: about $459K NPV and a projected ROI of 52%.

Key quantified benefit areas by Year 3:

• Fundraising improvements: 10% to 20% uplift by Year 3, driven by:
  • More efficient campaign development and donor communications.
  • Better personalization and more frequent outreach.

  This translates into a three-year NPV between $789,000 and $2 million for the composite organization.

• Operational efficiency: internal staff time savings of 10% to 25% by Year 3. Copilot:
  • Cuts time spent in meetings, searching for information, and creating content by up to 25%.
  • Reduces marketing and fundraising content and design time by an additional 25%.

  Combined, this yields a three-year NPV between $263,000 and $895,000.

• Technology and services cost reduction: 50% to 100% reduction in certain tools and services (for example, some AI tools and translation services), as Copilot replaces or consolidates them.
• People-related benefits:
  • Staff retention improvements: 10% to 18% better retention.
  • Onboarding time reduction: 15% to 25% faster ramp-up for new hires.

  Together, these people and culture benefits deliver a three-year NPV of at least $66,000 for the composite organization.

Key cost components:

• Licenses: about $30 per user per month for Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Implementation and management:
  • About $250,000 in third-party services to organize data management and governance before deployment.
  • Ongoing management equivalent to one full-time role.
  • Combined three-year NPV of these costs: about $694,000.
• Training and change management:
  • Initial training plus about 7 hours per user per year in subsequent years.
  • Approximately $6,000 on change management materials.
  • Three-year NPV of training and change management: about $54,000.

Forrester recommends that nonprofits plug their own staffing levels, fundraising mix, and salary assumptions into the TEI framework to build an organization-specific business case.

The study highlights several people and mission-related effects that go beyond direct financial returns.

Staff satisfaction, retention, and culture

• By offloading “mundane and repetitive tasks,” Copilot lets staff:
  • Complete more work in less time.
  • Improve work-life balance.
  • Spend more time on strategy and creative problem-solving.
• This shift contributes to:
  • 10% to 18% improvement in staff retention.
  • A more sustainable pace of work, which is important in resource-constrained environments.
• Leaders described Copilot as helping them “move beyond our resource constraints, delivering on our growth trajectory while maintaining our existing staffing levels.”

Onboarding and upskilling

• New hires can:
  • Use Copilot to quickly find policies, templates, and historical documents.
  • Ask natural-language questions instead of learning complex file structures.
• This leads to:
  • 15% to 25% faster onboarding.
  • Quicker time-to-value for new staff and volunteers.
• Ongoing use of Copilot also supports employee upskilling, as staff learn to work with AI and improve their digital skills.

Mission delivery and stakeholder engagement

• Program impact. Nonprofits are using Copilot to:
  • Tailor communications to beneficiaries’ reading levels.
  • Help people with intellectual disabilities better understand information and make decisions.
  • Design content that helps the broader public understand what it feels like to navigate complexity with a disability.
• Donor and charity support. One charity support organization plans to:
  • Combine its proprietary data with public data so donors can use natural-language queries to find charities that match their goals.
  • Offer charities best-practice recommendations based on what has worked in past fundraising campaigns.
  • Simplify grant applications by using Copilot to create a single, more accessible application process.

Overall, Microsoft 365 Copilot helps nonprofits reimagine how staff spend their time, how quickly new team members become effective, and how programs and fundraising can be designed and delivered in a more data-informed, human-centered way.