How To Set Up Office 365 Trial for Nonprofit (Video Tutorial)

Welcome to our walk-through of the Office 365 for Nonprofits Registration Process. Today we are going to walk-through signing up and activating your 30 Day Trial of Office 365, so let’s get started. Go to Microsoft Office 365 for nonprofits page at www.Microsoft.com/Office365Nonprofits. Look for the sign up for a trial link and select the Office 365 Enterprise E3 for Nonprofits free trial. Now you need to set up your account. Once you arrive to the main sign up page, you’ll be asked to fill in a number of fields. First, select your country or region, then type in your first and last name. This will be the name of the primary contact in your account. It should be the actual name of someone at your nonprofit organization in order for us to validate your nonprofit status. Next, fill in your e-mail address which Microsoft will use to send you important account information. The e-mail address you provide should be associated with both the name you entered above and your organization. This e-mail address will be used to contact your nonprofit for validation purposes.

Then fill in your organization’s address; city, state, zip code, your organization’s phone number, as well as your organization’s name. Once you have filled out your personal and organization’s information, you will then create your user ID. You use this ID to sign into Office 365. You’ll notice that once you fill in the organization’s name above, that text will pre-populate here in the ID field. Feel free to change it. Then come up with a good password which you’ll use to log into the account. Make sure it is secure by using a combination of upper and lower case characters and numbers. Confirm your password and move to the final step in creating your account which is to verify your phone number by entering your mobile or landline number for verification, and occasionally resetting your password if need be. You can choose to receive your verification code via text or phone call. I’ll go ahead and request a text message.

You will then be sent a code that you will then paste into the final field, and hit create my account. After creating your account, you’ll be asked to verify your eligibility by verifying your domain. This is not a required step to activate your free trial. If you have the expertise to make a DNS change, you can go ahead and make this change now. Otherwise, you can skip it and your domain will be verified later. Welcome to your Office 365 Admin Center. You’ve now completed setting up your account and you should also receive a confirmation e-mail from Microsoft.

From this page, you can access the support section for questions about your account, view your account settings, assign licenses, do product configuration, and access resources. Okay, you are almost done! Your last step is to activate your Office 365 trial account. This will kick off the validation and approval process for your nonprofit. To activate your account, retrieve the e-mail confirmation that was sent to you after setting up your main account. Click on Get Started With Your Trial to kick off your activation. There you go! Now you have an active trial account of Office 365 for Nonprofits. Your trial account lasts for 30 days while we validate your nonprofit status. Validation can take up to 20 days, and you may receive an e-mail request for additional information. I hope this was helpful. See you next time.