The Client
Charity Excellence is the largest and fastest growing UK charity
community with 40,000 members. They provide a free one-stop-shop that
enables any non-profit to find funding, free help, resources and data
via their technology ecosystem.
The Client's Problem
Charity Excellence required a critical review of the system, to
identify possible issues and advice on how best to aggregate and explain
the data so that it provides valid, reliable, and useful output that
can be safely used by any external organisation.
The work had all been carried out by the Founder and, although he had
significant design and data expertise, he had worked alone without a
critical friend and was not a data professional.
The Solution
The proposed Microsoft Power Platform based solution is a cloud hosted solution that addresses the challenges with the current solution with regards to scalability, governance, and application life cycle maintenance. The solution makes use of various Power Platform component-based services that leverage Charity Excellence questionnaire responses stored in the Dataverse (cloud).
The components used in this solution are:
- Dataverse: Hosts four standard tables and 18 custom tables
- Power Apps: Used to build two model-driven applications and one web portal based on Power Pages for non-authenticated users.
- Power Automate: Used to build an automated cloud flow that seeks approval from specified approvers when a question is created / updated / deleted in the question bank.
- Power Virtual Agent: Used to build a chat agent (TechBunnai) that responds to users queries in natural language; trained on https://www.charityexcellence.co.uk/ repository. It can also assist with queries on assessment, questionnaire, funding finder and help finder reports.
- Power BI: Used to design and publish above reports and train the chat agent.
- AI Builder: Currently used in a limited scale. Leveraged by TechBunnai.
The Benefits
- Upon viewing the proof-of-concept solution, the Charity Excellence Board agreed to pilot the solution.
The proposed solution allows for distributed governance of the questionnaire, provides a centralised view of operations and lowers the lifecycle maintenance cost. In the words of the Founder:
“ …his approach to meet our specific needs, explained what was (for us) a new and very technical technology very clearly and simply and put a huge amount of work into the project that went far beyond anything we might reasonably have asked for. The final result was a working pilot of the platform and apps, which has led to a fundamental change in our strategic approach… “
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