No Upgrade Needed – Free Tasks You Can Automate With Power Automate
If you are looking to get serious when it comes to automating mundane, but necessary tasks during your workday, you’ve likely found yourself exploring Microsoft’s Power Automate tool.
A cloud-based service that helps users build workflows that automate business tasks and processes, Power Automate provides a powerful opportunity to reduce time-consuming tasks. And, if you have a basic Microsoft 365 license, you might be surprised at the amount and type of automations you can build without any additional licenses (including the Power Automate Premium!)
Decoding Microsoft Licenses
First, let’s quickly cover the different Microsoft 365 licenses that a nonprofit typically uses. As of January 2024, there are three categories of nonprofit-priced Microsoft 365 licenses: Basic (free for up to 300 users), Standard ($3/user/month) and Premium ($5.50/user/month with 10 free licenses for eligible nonprofits). You can visit Microsoft’s licensing and price page that shares details on what is included in each category.
Power Automate, which is housed in Microsoft’s Power Platform offering, is included in all of these licensing options at no additional cost. If users want to upgrade their Power Automate offerings (more on this below), nonprofits can take advantage of a reduced license cost of $3.80 per user per month. Before you fork out the money for a Premium license, let’s explore tasks you can automate with your existing 365 license.
No Money, No Problem – Free Automating Tasks You Can Setup Today
Many nonprofits are dealing with similar challenges – limited funds and limited capacity. Power Automate can surprisingly help both those issues by lessening the workload of staff without adding costs. Here are five examples of tasks you can automate with the free version of Power Automate:
- Connect a Microsoft Form and Auto-Generated Emails
Microsoft Forms, included in basic 365 licenses, allow users to create online surveys, forms, and questionnaires for internal or external users. Power Automate can have specific form answers trigger a response that emails internal staff.
Example: Your volunteers use a paper and pencil form to sign up for three different types of opportunities. Soliciting food donations, cooking & serving meals, or cleaning up for your organization’s monthly community dinner. Three different staff members coordinate those three different opportunities, and right now trying to organize the different submissions and get them into the right hands is a chore. Solution? Instead, you can use Microsoft forms to create a digital volunteer form for community members to sign up for all three different opportunities on one form. Use Power Automate to connect your volunteer form with email notifications to the appropriate staff. Volunteers submit their opportunity preference, and Power Automate takes their response and sends an automatic email notification to the correct staff member to reach out.
2. Have an Email Sent When a SharePoint File Is Updated
If your company-wide files are stored in SharePoint, Power Automate allows you to connect actions in SharePoint to your email.
Example: Your draft budget needs to be reviewed by your Board Members prior to the next in-person meeting, but they have two weeks to provide input, and you’d like to see right away when comments or edits are made. Power Automate allows you to build a workflow so that when any comments or edits are made in a document, you can be notified. You can customize that email to include links to the files, who made the edit, and much more!
3. Task Notifications in Planner
When a Task in planner is assigned, Power Automate can send an email notification with details on the task.
Example: Every week, you need to review the tasks that are assigned to different users for an ongoing project and call-out any tasks that haven't been completed yet. Power Automate can use a workflow to send you an email notification on tasks that are still not marked as completed along with an email notification to the team member who is assigned to that task. Then, you can have Power Automate send a meeting request to that the team member so that you can discuss why their task isn't complete yet.
4. Don’t just send emails, get them too!
If you receive routine email alerts with the same subject, or from the same sender that requires an action, Power Automate can use that email to trigger your next move.
Example: Your Intake Team gets an email notification every time someone fills out your intake form for community services. Power Automate search that email body for the keyword "pantry" that then triggers a Teams message to be sent to your Food Security Team. Or, search for the keyword "housing" to send a Teams message to your Housing Security Team.
Why And How Are These Free?
While it isn’t one per say, think of Power Automate as an add-on to your Microsoft License. If you can send an email, it can automate with email. If you have access to a SharePoint library, it can automate with SharePoint. Anything that is accessible with your 365 license likely can benefit from Power Automate. These features are another reason why nonprofit Office 365 offers are so valuable.
So, if you have a 365 license and a task to automate within the Microsoft universe, then you have all you need to test out your first workflow. Head to make.powerautomate.com, hit “create” on the left-hand side, start with a blank flow or choose from a template, name your flow, and pick your triggers. Editing and adjusting your flow once it is built is fairly easy, so risk is low when playing with Power Automate.
When It’s Worth It to Upgrade
If your tasks include tools within the Microsoft universe (Outlook, Excel, Planner, OneDrive, SharePoint, Etc.), then there is a good chance you can build workflows that will do the bulk of the lift without upgrading your license. But, Power Automate is a part of the Power Platform for a reason – it’s powerful. For $3.80, Power Automate Premium allows users to build workflows with software and tools outside of the Microsoft world – we’re talking Adobe, Salesforce, DocuSign, SAP, Twilio, and more.
Premium users can connect actions and triggers in their DocuSign account with actions and triggers in their Office account. And that’s not all – you can add approvals to your emails or to SharePoint documents to streamline review processes. Premium users also have access to other benefits, namely a Power Automate Dataverse, a single storage option to integrate data from multiple sources that then can be used to create dashboards, analytics, and, you guessed, more automations.
If you need more support or need help getting your feet wet, check out our recorded Intro to Power Automate webinar. If more hands-on support is helpful, explore our Power Automate and Its Possibilities services that can help you build out document management, employee onboarding processes, custom training and more. And remember, a call to Tech Impact is always free, so let us help you get on your way to automating.