On 29 July 2026 Microsoft wrote: “Good news. You are approved for nonprofit grants and discounts from Microsoft.” School Aid MTÜ, Estonian register code 80646408, is now part of Microsoft Elevate.
Who they are. Microsoft Elevate is Microsoft’s social-impact arm, working with close to a million non-profits and education systems worldwide. Microsoft has said it will deliver more than five billion dollars in discounts, donations and grants to non-profits over the coming year. For an approved organisation that means grant and discounted access to Microsoft 365 and the wider Microsoft cloud.
Who checked us, and it was not Microsoft. Microsoft does not take an applicant’s word for its charitable status. Verification was carried out by Goodstack — legally We Are Percent Limited, of London, and known as Percent before its 2024 rebrand — the independent validator large companies use to establish whether an organisation claiming to be a charity actually is one under the law of its country of registration. Microsoft then applied its own eligibility criteria on top of that finding. Being verified once does not get you approved anywhere; it only means you are allowed to ask.
Why it matters. Charities are judged on the share of income that reaches the beneficiary, and rightly so. But every charity still needs email, file storage, accounting and somewhere safe to keep its records — and someone pays for that. When a technology company grants it instead, the ratio improves for a real reason rather than an accounting one. For School Aid that is the difference between spending a donated euro on software and spending it on a desk.
It matters for a second reason too. A charity registered in October 2024, with no history and no reputation, has nothing to offer a stranger except its paperwork. Each organisation that has approved School Aid reached its own conclusion, separately, against its own standard. That is worth more to a cautious donor than anything we could write about ourselves.