CARE International

Providing critical insights in minutes

CARE International | Not-for-profit

The customer

CARE International UK is a global charity that is part of a worldwide confederation dedicated to fighting poverty and injustice in the world’s most vulnerable places.

CARE was experiencing challenges with the management, access, and maintenance of its data. As an international Not-for-Profit organisation, CARE managed hundreds of projects across the globe. The critical data surrounding these projects were stored in various locations, each department followed different processes and procedures and as a result, the location and structure of data differed.

“It previously took days to create reports, we can now provide critical insights in minutes!”

Claire Bedwell-Thomas, Programme Team Assistant at CARE International

The challenge

CARE was experiencing challenges with the management, access, and maintenance of its data. As an international Not-for-Profit
organisation, CARE manage hundreds of projects across the globe. The critical data surrounding these projects were stored in various locations, each department followed different processes and procedures and as a result, the location and structure of data differed. Some of the challenges CARE were experiencing due to the existing data storage solution included:

Duplication of data

Using legacy technology

Difficult to gain insight

Time-consuming reporting

For the CARE Management Team this made creating reports extremely challenging. Management needed regular reports with project updates, progress and lessons learned to support the launch of new projects and manage the performance of existing ones. Pulling the data for a report would take a full day with added time needed to analyse and find valuable insights. This challenge became more apparent when management needed to make critical, time-bound decisions. The current system made this task difficult to complete efficiently.

The solution

The technology used to support the automation of CARE’s data management and project lifecycle processes included:

Power Apps
CARE needed a user-friendly interface to submit data. Power Apps provided the ease and accessibility needed to ensure all users submitted
data consistently. The application is available on desktop and mobile to allow the input of data anywhere and anytime.

Power Automate
One of the challenges with the existing system was that specific data was hard to locate; Power Automate helped notify end users when data they were interested in had been updated. This meant users had direct access to the data they needed and made pulling data from the system quick, further enhancing the turnaround of reports to management.

Power BI
Power BI enables the CARE team to create reports instantly, allowing users to drill down into the data. Reports are produced dynamically and refresh automatically ensuring the team have access to the data they need on demand.

The results

The Power Platform suite has allowed the CARE team to automate the way they store, receive and report on the data that is critical to the proactive management of their portfolio. CARE has seen significant benefits since streamlining and improving its data solution:

Central location for storing data

All project data is stored in an easy to access location. Having one system that people can access when they want to view and/or update data.

User-friendly

The application used to submit data is easy to use and intuitive for all departments of the organisation.

More efficient

Due to the accessibility of the new system, data is managed much more efficiently throughout the organisation. Data is easy to input and extract from the application wherever users are located, providing more time to analyse and make critical, real-time decisions based on the insights discovered.

Clearer insights

The new system has not only supported CARE with managing data, but it has allowed users to interrogate the data in better ways, for example comparing projects, looking deeper into specific themes or topics and as a result being able to produce reports for management with more insight.