Today Microsoft announced the availability of Microsoft 365 for Campaigns, a powerful new tool from our Defending Democracy Program designed to bring the advanced security capabilities of our Microsoft 365 Business offering to all federal political campaigns and national party committees in the United States. Campaigns and party organizations can now sign up for the service by visiting here.
Microsoft 365 for Campaigns can be set up in less than five minutes by any staffer on behalf of an organization using a simple and easy-to-understand onboarding process that surfaces the important choices for achieving a high level of security, and it’s available at a 75% discount for $5 per month per person. This is why multiple campaigns have committed to deploying it.
Political campaigns are fast-moving environments that face significant security threats from nation-state actors and criminal scammers – much like large enterprises. However, unlike enterprises, political campaigns often must ramp up and down quickly, vary in their ability to hire dedicated IT staff, and have unpredictable budgets. In some cases, they rely on scrappy “accidental administrators” who help with IT on the side; in other cases, they have experienced IT consultants but need to focus their budgets on getting out their candidates’ message.
Microsoft 365 for Campaigns brings together the world-class productivity of Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility and Security with new collaboration solutions like Microsoft Teams. Regardless of level of technical experience, these solutions offer comprehensive email, filesharing, collaboration, cloud storage and conference calling solutions with easy-to-configure intelligent security and device management capabilities to help safeguard your organization.
The setup process focuses on enabling features like:
- Multi-factor authentication: Additional security though an extra authentication step at sign-in
- Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection: Protects email from phishing and malware attacks
- Mobile app protection: Secures access to sensitive data on mobile devices and in mobile applications while leaving personal data like photos and text messages untouched
- Document classification and protection: Allows people to label documents as confidential and identifies content like credit cards or social security numbers, applying policies for encryption and sharing
- Update prioritization: Accelerates the installation of security patches and feature updates to installed Office apps
Administrators configuring Microsoft 365 for Campaigns are also able to limit the number of people with administrator access, and easily add or remove users from the system as the campaign staff changes, paying only for usage month-by-month without annual commitments.
In addition to the above, the Microsoft 365 for Campaigns sign-up process allows for streamlined enrollment into Microsoft’s AccountGuard service, a sophisticated tool that provides notification about cyberthreats, including attacks by known nation-state actors, in a unified way across both email systems run by organizations and the personal accounts of these organizations’ leaders and staff who opt in.
Microsoft 365 for Campaigns is available at a price of just $5 per user per month – the same price as offered to nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations. New campaigns are encouraged to use the Microsoft 365 for Campaigns for their productivity needs from the ground up. If your organization is already an Office 365 customer, you’re able to switch to this new offering. There are also convenient tools to help switch to Microsoft 365 from other cloud or on-premise email systems – just visit the sign-up link to get started.
While Microsoft 365 for Campaigns will be initially available in the United States, we are exploring opportunities to offer it in other democracies in the future as we have with other offerings from our Defending Democracy Program.