In our previous post we looked at the governance side of Microsoft’s decision to end the free Microsoft 365 Business Premium and Office 365 E1 grants for charities. This post is the practical counterpart. If you’re the person who actually has to do the migration — the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of a small charity wearing the Information Technology (IT) hat, an office manager, or an in-house IT lead — this walks you through it in the order you need to do it.
A warning before we start: Microsoft does not do this for you automatically. It has to be done manually inside the Microsoft 365 admin centre, in the right sequence, before your renewal date. Get the order wrong and you can end up with users temporarily unable to access email or files. The good news is that for a typical small charity this is a 60-to-90-minute job, not a weekend project.
Before you start: the five-minute pre-flight
Don’t touch a licence until you have done all five of these.
- Know your renewal date. In the admin centre, go to Billing → Your products and note the renewal date of your current Business Premium or Office 365 E1 subscription. Everything in this guide must be completed before that date — leave at least 7 working days’ buffer.
- Confirm your nonprofit eligibility is still active. Sign in to the Microsoft Nonprofit Hub with your tenant’s Global Administrator account. If it shows you’re verified, you’re fine. If it asks you to re-verify, do that first — verification in England and Wales keys off your Charity Commission registration and can take a few days.
- Make a user list. Export your current users and their assigned licences from Users → Active users → Export users. This gives you a simple Comma-Separated Values (CSV) you can work from, and a rollback reference if anything goes sideways.
- Decide your licence mix. Before you open the admin centre, have a decision in writing: which users get free Business Basic, which (if any) get paid Business Standard or Business Premium, and who gets nothing because they’ve left. Don’t make this decision inside the admin centre — you’ll rush it.
- Back up your data. Microsoft’s retention policies give you a grace period, but don’t rely on it. At minimum: trigger a OneDrive sync on all devices, confirm SharePoint sites are intact, and if you want belt-and-braces, run a one-off export of mailbox data using the Microsoft 365 admin centre’s content search or a third-party backup tool.
The transition, step by step
Follow these in order. You’ll need to be signed in as a Global Administrator.
Step 1 — Add the new Business Basic grant to your tenant
In the admin centre, go to Billing → Purchase services, find Microsoft 365 Business Basic (Nonprofit Staff Pricing), and choose Get it now. You can request up to 300 free licences. This doesn’t move anybody yet — it just puts the new licences in your tenant alongside the old ones.
If you’re also buying paid licences (Business Standard or Business Premium at the discounted nonprofit rate), purchase them at the same time so you’re not jumping back and forth.
Step 2 — Confirm the licences have landed
Go to Billing → Your products. You should now see both the old subscription (Business Premium or Office 365 E1) and the new one(s). Wait 10–15 minutes before the next step — there’s a provisioning lag and moving licences too quickly occasionally errors out.
Step 3 — Reassign each user to a new licence
Go to Users → Active users. Select the users you want to move (you can tick multiple at once), then choose Manage product licences → Replace. Remove the old licence, add the new one, save.
Work in small batches of 5–10 users rather than selecting everyone at once — it’s easier to spot errors. Start with a single test user, preferably your own admin account, confirm it works (can you sign in, open Outlook on the web, access OneDrive?), and only then do the rest.
If you’re dropping a user from Business Premium to Business Basic, they will lose their installed desktop apps. Word, Excel, PowerPoint and desktop Outlook will stop activating within a few days of the licence change. Users can either switch to the browser versions (same login at office.com) or, if they’ve been moved to Business Standard, reinstall the desktop apps from the same portal.
Step 4 — Verify, then cancel the old subscription
Once every user has been moved and you’ve confirmed they can still access their email and files, go back to Billing → Your products, select the old Business Premium or Office 365 E1 subscription, and choose Cancel subscription. Microsoft will warn you about data retention — read it carefully. Cancelling before all users are off it will disable their access.
Do not just let it expire at renewal. If the old subscription lapses while users are still licensed on it, there’s a risk window where services disable before the new licence takes full effect.
Step 5 — Deal with what Business Basic doesn’t cover
If you’ve dropped from Business Premium, you have a security gap to fill. Three items to tackle in the week after migration:
- Enforce Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for every user. In the admin centre, Settings → Org settings → Security & privacy → Multi-factor authentication, turn on Security defaults as a minimum. This is free and works on Business Basic.
- Decide what replaces Microsoft Intune for device management. For very small charities, Windows’ built-in BitLocker + a written device policy may be enough. For anyone managing more than ~10 devices, look at Microsoft Intune for Education (if eligible) or a paid Business Premium licence just for the IT lead, which lets you manage the estate without paying per user.
- Decide what replaces Microsoft Defender for Business. Windows 11 Defender (built-in) is materially better than it used to be and is adequate for most small charities. Larger or higher-risk organisations should budget for a paid endpoint product.
The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) Small Charity Guide is the best free reference for deciding what “enough” looks like.
Common pitfalls
- Shared mailboxes. These are free up to 50 GB and don’t need a licence — but if you accidentally strip a licence from a user whose mailbox is still the primary on a shared resource, things break in odd ways. Audit shared mailboxes before migrating.
- Teams phone numbers. If your charity uses Teams calling with assigned numbers, Business Basic doesn’t include Teams Phone. Check before migrating anyone whose day job involves a phone.
- Conditional access rules. If your old Business Premium tenant had Microsoft Entra ID Conditional Access policies configured, they stop working when the last Premium licence is removed. Decide whether to buy one Premium licence to retain them, or replace them with simpler Security Defaults.
- Auto-renewal. Triple-check the old subscription is set to not auto-renew before renewal day. Microsoft has been known to auto-bill cancelled-but-not-disabled subscriptions.
When to call a partner
Do this yourself if you have fewer than about 20 users and a confident IT lead. Call in help if:
- You have more than 300 users on the legacy grant (Microsoft will engage directly via the Tech for Social Impact (TSI) Partner Desk).
- You have custom Conditional Access, Intune compliance policies or email routing that needs to survive the transition.
- You’re also changing domains or merging tenants at the same time.
A Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partner who specialises in UK charities will typically do a straightforward transition for a few hundred pounds, and will often find enough savings elsewhere to pay for themselves.
If you’d like to talk this through with someone before you get started, or just have a sanity check on your plan, get in touch with the RCVDA team — we’re happy to talk it through.
Sources and further reading:
