Nonprofit & Education
Managed IT for Pacific Northwest nonprofits and educational organizations. Scoped to what your budget can actually sustain.
Nonprofits carry the same infrastructure risks as any business: ransomware, data loss, system outages. What’s different is the margin for absorbing them. A donor database down during a campaign isn’t an inconvenience, it’s lost mission funding. A grant compliance audit with missing records isn’t paperwork, it’s next year’s budget. The work is to prioritize the risks that would hurt most, fix those first, and build runbooks your team can execute without us standing there.
Tell us what’s breaking →The donor database that went down on day two of the year-end campaign, with the only person who knew the system on vacation. The ransomware email that made the board ask “could that happen to us” and nobody could answer with confidence. The grant compliance audit that wanted three years of records from a filing system that changed twice in that span. The volunteer-built website and the staff-of-one IT department, both doing their best, both one bad day from a crisis. The quote from a big MSP that cost more than the program it was supposed to protect.
If any of that sounds familiar, we’ve worked through it before.
The Craftwork Group is a young entity. The people doing the work aren’t. Our team brings more than a hundred years of combined IT experience, doing this work since 1999, across organizations where every dollar spent on infrastructure is a dollar argued for.
Nonprofits with 15 to 100 staff are a sweet spot for us: large enough to have real infrastructure risk, constrained enough to need a firm that scopes honestly. We know the donor database, the grant compliance audit, and the three-day campaign window that can’t go down. We also know where to find nonprofit licensing rates that most MSPs don’t bother to source, because the margin on reselling them is thin. Microsoft 365 Nonprofit and Google for Nonprofits alone can shift an IT budget meaningfully.
Honest scoping means we will sometimes tell you not to buy something. The risk register for a 30-person nonprofit is short, and most of the spend belongs on the top three items. We prioritize what would hurt most, fix that, and write runbooks your team can execute without calling us. Dependence is good business for an MSP. We’d rather earn the relationship a different way.
What working with us actually looks like. Helpdesk opens at 6:30 AM and runs until 5:00 PM, with on-call coverage after hours. Standard SLA is one-hour response; in practice, most calls get answered live as they come in. We treat phone calls as priority because if you’re calling, it’s urgent. The only thing that bumps a live call is a monitoring alert flagging a system down or under attack. We’re often the ones who tell you something broke before you noticed. Often we have it fixed before you’d have called.
A note on the rest of the field. We’ve spent the last few months calling MSPs posing as a buyer to see how the market actually operates. Over seventy-five percent never picked up the phone. None returned the sales inquiry. If you’ve shopped for IT support before, that probably tracks. We don’t work that way.
Microsoft 365 Nonprofit and Google Workspace for Nonprofits set up correctly from the start: eligibility verified, licensing sourced at nonprofit rates, identity and email built on the discounted tier without the gaps that usually come with it. If you’re already paying commercial rates, the first project might be making that stop.
Before any of the niche depth matters, the standard MSP work has to be solid. Workstation and server monitoring. Microsoft 365 management. Firewalls, switching, and Wi-Fi sized for your actual office, not an enterprise template. Backup and disaster recovery with documented recovery drills, not the kind nobody runs until something breaks.
Backup designed against the attack that actually ends small organizations: immutable copies an attacker can’t encrypt, recovery procedures tested and timed before they’re needed, and a written runbook so the response to a bad morning is a checklist, not a panic. The board question “could that happen to us” gets a real answer.
The donor database, the constituent records, and the grant documentation protected with access controls, encryption, and retention that match how the data is actually used. Campaign windows get treated like the production deadlines they are. Grant compliance records stay retrievable across the years an auditor can reach back.
The honest wins for a lean staff are administrative: indexing years of policies, board minutes, and grant documents so answers stop depending on one person’s memory, document classification for the paperwork that arrives every week, and reconciliation between the donor system and the books. Hours back for people who already wear three hats.
What we won’t do: sell you an AI project when a backup fixes the actual risk. Constrained budgets deserve sequencing discipline. The foundation comes first; the interesting tools come when the foundation is paid for and boring.
Your model choice. Your API keys to OpenAI, Anthropic, or whoever you pick. Your data on infrastructure you own. We configure, deploy, and operate; you keep the keys and the option to take it all elsewhere.
No phone tree. No demo deck. A real conversation about what’s breaking in your organization, what the budget actually allows, and whether there’s a path where we’d actually be useful. If we’re not the right fit, we’ll tell you and point you somewhere honest.
If we are a fit, the next step is an operations audit. A half-day on-site, a written assessment of what we’d do and what it would cost, prioritized so you can fund it in stages. No obligation past that point.
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