Médecins Sans Frontières UK unlocks insights to save lives with the Microsoft centralized data platform

MSF UK provides medical assistance to people affected by conflict, epidemics, disasters, or exclusion from healthcare. With teams made up of tens of thousands of professionals working in health and medical care, logistics, administration, communications, and skilled trades, they are experts at working in fast-moving and highly insecure environments. Whether it's launching a rapid response or delivering community care, they go wherever they are needed most.

MSF UK recruits staff, provides technical and strategic support, and generates vital funds for its medical missions, but technical issues hampered their fundraising operations. Siloed data, manual and time-consuming reporting processes, and the difficulty of transforming mountains of data into insights distracted from MSF UK’s critical mission.

The nonprofit worked with Microsoft partner mhance to build out a centralized data platform connected to business-critical applications. Timely, accurate, and easy-to-generate insights now help the nonprofit improve fundraising operations for maximum effectiveness in raising income for urgent medical care.

"Our unified data model is freeing up people's resources and making us more efficient,” says Morwenna McNeill, Data Insight Specialist at MSF UK. “We’re able to react and respond quickly to data or reporting requests, and we seize opportunities faster.”

Empowering informed teams through self-service

MSF UK’s data unification effort is comprised of seamlessly connected layers on the back end that provide reliable information without frequent failures. Data from Dynamics 365 and other sources flows into an Azure SQL database, which provides a single source of truth. There the data is further reorganized in a dimensional model to provide a fully featured data warehouse in Azure SQL.

The architecture results in a straightforward solution accessible to nontechnical users. “One big advantage of the data warehouse is not just the numbers it gives you, but how easy it is to make selections on the data. You can slice and dice it however you need,” says Gerard Dayman, Chief Data Officer at mhance. This self-service means business users can rely less on a limited number of technical staff to find and analyze data.

In its discovery phase, mhance collected a list of calculations MSF UK staff frequently asked for. The partner built out these calculated fields, which are written back to mhance’s NfP 365 solution built atop Dynamics 365. CRM users can now access these calculations, such as a donor’s most common donation amount, without leaving the platform. What’s more, they can easily generate more nuanced numbers, such as giving totals within a particular timeframe or amounts donated via a given channel, by adjusting filters. “Dynamics users have the advantage of accessing data from multiple angles without the heavy lifting of generating or calculating those figures,” Dayman says.

MSF UK and mhance are also integrating data from external analytics sources and their digital marketing platform into the Microsoft data warehouse. This data used to be siloed by platform and team, limiting its use. Drawing it into a central location provides a 360-degree picture of supporters and democratizes the data organization-wide.

MSF UK can apply these easy-to-generate insights to everything from deepening donor relationships to adjusting marketing strategies. For example, staff can run a report that shows donor engagement and giving habits by channel to evaluate how marketing resonates with different supporters, then tailor communications accordingly.

Uncovering insights for data-driven action

Staff used to need days or even weeks to create vital reports, by which time the data was outdated. With their Azure Synapse-based unified data system, accurate information is always ready to inform crucial decisions.

Dashboards built by mhance pull data from the data warehouse to deliver insights that teams regularly need, from results of fundraising events to legacy reporting. “The data warehouse simplifies end user reporting through Power BI,” Dayman says. “Prebuilt measures, predefined templates, and standard dashboards make it easy to pull pieces for both ad hoc and routine reports.”

The data, which is refreshed nightly, provides a near-real-time status update—a significant improvement from waiting three or more weeks for KPI reports generated from manual Excel calculations. The MSF UK insights team extended these dashboards and added more, building out a repository of dashboards that staff use for everyday operations and long-term plans alike. 

The information and saved time free up MSF UK staff to focus on raising funds to support their lifesaving work. “We now have more time to focus on strategy because we’re spending less time pulling data,” says Ayeshah Muhammad, CRM and Data Insight Manager at MSF UK.

Using data to become more emergency-ready

No one can predict when a natural disaster or disease outbreak will strike, but one thing is certain—these kinds of crises, and the medical needs they create, will continue. MSF UK is leveraging data to increase its capacity to generate insights. This clearer, more complete picture allows them to be strategic in the way they raise funds for MSF UK’s medical work around the world.

Crises tend to generate more one-time gifts and attract new MSF UK donors, which provide a quick injection of funds to react. Through mhance’s NfP 365 solution atop Dynamics 365, MSF UK tags data by tracking source campaign, channels, and designated funds. This tagging identifies gifts earmarked for a particular emergency, and that data is persisted to the data warehouse. Easy data access in a single location enables the team to spin up a new dashboard to track and report on funding restricted to that emergency if required.

Building the data warehouse also sets the foundation for future machine learning goals. MSF UK is pursuing AI-powered predictive modeling to analyze historical data and identify who may be likely to support crisis funding, for instance. “This will enable us to appeal to those donors with a targeted campaign to respond to an emergency quickly—something we wouldn’t be able to do without the warehouse,” Muhammad says. These indicators will help the fundraising team pinpoint the next best action in an engagement strategy and personalize communications, such as referring to their past donations to crisis missions.

Understanding giving patterns to maximize fundraising

All MSF UK’s funding comes from private donations, demonstrating the organization’s independence. That can be vital when securing access to volatile regions and the vulnerable people who live there. MSF UK’s fundraising team strives to nurture those critical relationships through insights gleaned from data. That way, the nonprofit ensures a steady income stream for ongoing and emerging projects.

MSF UK’s data warehouse in Azure integrates data from Dynamics 365 and beyond, unlocking a treasure trove of donor information. In minutes, the team can extract information from the data warehouse to use in correlation modeling projects, a first step that used to require hours or even days of collating data from multiple sources. 

The nonprofit is tapping this newfound capacity to better understand giving patterns and forecast income. For example, MSF UK’s new income forecasting model, built in Python in the organization’s data warehouse, looks at historic data and has been used to predict regular giving income, achieving up to 99% accuracy in forecasting. The model has supported the leadership team in making strategic decisions and has helped to plug information gaps with reliable figures. Future machine learning initiatives aim to predict who may be ready to promise a legacy bequest and whether to suggest an upgrade in recurring donations or ask for a one-time gift.

“With all this data, there’s so much potential for machine learning,” Muhammad says. “Being able to reach the right donors at the right time with the right message is so important for fundraising.”

Current and upcoming benefits of a centralized data platform will continue to enable MSF UK’s life-saving efforts. “Data access is opening up real collaboration and teamwork,” McNeill says. “That is essential for our organization as we grow—and as need for our medical care grows across the world.”

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