Author: Dan Lammot, CEO & Co-founder threshold.world
Last July, after Microsoft announced the planned retirement of Fundraising & Engagement as of 12/31/2026, I shared a perspective on how I see this decision as short-term pain, long-term gain.
The purpose of this post is to provide an update on what we've learned through engagement with our nonprofit fundraising customers over the past six months.
Progress Report:
The following points summarize what we and our customers have been doing since the announcement:
threshold developed a F&E transition process and templates to support customers through their transition evaluations. The process includes Discovery, Analysis, Recommendations, Final Report, and Customer Decision stages. We are taking a data-driven approach to Analysis and Recommendations based on a field by field, process by process review. This approach yields a highly accurate outcome and minimizes the time customers must dedicate to the evaluation, focusing their effort on considering paths forward rather than decompiling their current tech.
The F&E Transition process can take from three 3 weeks to 3 months to complete, depending on a customer's individual deployment of F&E and their assessment of options following Final Report publishing.
All but two of our F&E customers are actively working through the threshold F&E Transition process. One has completed the process and made a decision, and one is deciding when to start the process.
Based on discussions to date, all but one of our nonprofit fundraising customers plans to remain on the Microsoft Power Platform and/or Dynamics 365.
Next Steps:
The following are our planned next steps:
threshold's F&E customers will all complete the F&E transition process before the end of May 2025 (most will be complete in March 2025).
threshold F&E transition team leaders continue to catalogue and distill key learning from our customers.
Key Learning:
The following are our key learnings to date (I'll share a final update in June 2025):
Customers understand Microsoft's decision but many, especially smaller nonprofits, are concerned about the impact to their operations and, especially in today's political climate, the impact on their financial resources.
Nearly all of our nonprofit fundraising customers want to stay on Microsoft. The benefits of the platform, especially relative to the alternatives in the market, outweigh the pain of transitioning. This perspective is largely driven by a CRM Platform perspective, rather than a fundraising point solution goal.
There's a critical role that threshold can play as a fundraising and Microsoft platform expert in continued service to our customers. More to come on this soon.