The Salvation Army UK embraces data-driven decisions with Microsoft Fabric

The Salvation Army was founded in 1865 when church leaders took the idea of living a Christian faith from the pews to the streets. Today, it is active in more than 130 countries. In the UK, The Salvation Army's 650 churches and community centers offer a variety of services including food banks, debt and employment advice, worship, lunch clubs, homelessness outreach, and more. The organization also provides supported accommodation for people who are homeless, residential care homes, addiction services, and specialist support for modern slavery survivors. “Motivated by our Christian faith, we’re all about supporting the most disadvantaged in our communities,” says Andy Whitby, Assistant Territorial Property Director at The Salvation Army UK.

Yet siloed data and time-consuming manual reporting processes led to decisions based on incomplete information, explains Lev Malinin, Head of Enterprise Systems, Data, and AI at The Salvation Army UK. “We needed a data platform to enable holistic, data-driven decision making.” 

The church and charity adopted Microsoft Fabric, the unified data and analytics platform, to integrate their data sources and systems. Fabric is enabling The Salvation Army UK to securely manage its many properties, inform operational and strategic decisions, and tap emerging technology to serve the most vulnerable with dignity. 

“The demands for our service are only growing,” Whitby says. “We’re adapting to meet those needs.”

Managing a diversity of properties

The Salvation Army UK operates 2,700 properties across the country “so that our mission can flourish,” says Whitby. “The right properties in the right locations with the right facilities enable the people at the forefront to deliver our great services.” The diversity of properties—from supported accommodation for people who are homeless to commercial farms—can make tracking, managing, and reporting on them difficult.

The church and charity use a third-party SaaS to manage and organize things like repair needs, but the tool did not have the reporting function they required. Every month, staff had to export data into an Excel spreadsheet, hunt down missing figures, calculate numbers, cut and paste tables, and compile reports that often ran to 50 pages. This manual process took several days and was sometimes delayed by slow replies or hard-to-locate data. Retrieving basic information, such as how many properties The Salvation Army UK operated at a given moment, required a multistep process that could take hours. These conditions led to inconsistent reports and questions on the quality of the data to inform decision making. 

To get on the same page, The Salvation Army UK connected the external tool’s data lake to Microsoft Fabric with a data pipeline. The unified data platform enabled the team to review the completeness and accuracy of information, flagging missing or contradictory entries. 

The church and charity selected fields to track data quality. They plugged data gaps at the source, rather than at the report level, to eliminate the issue going forward. Over several months, The Salvation Army UK’s data trust score tripled, to 97%. “Everyone was impressed by the speed to value,” Malinin says. “It’s impossible to underestimate the impact this had on the quality of our data, and I’m not sure we would ever have gotten there without Microsoft Fabric.” 

Enabling data-driven decisions

The Salvation Army UK runs monthly reports on property projects, statutory compliance, repairs, and maintenance for its properties. The team built a series of Power BI dashboards to calculate and display information needed for monthly reporting as well as other recurring needs. "Now we get high-impact information at the touch of a button,” Whitby says. “The data platform has changed our way of working.”

With a few clicks, managers can filter the dashboards, pulling the relevant information from Fabric. Now it takes just a few moments to create customized reports for different audiences, such as regional property teams or the board. “We can slice and dice the data to get practically any piece of information instantaneously,” Whitby says. “Power BI gives us the agility to present data in a compelling and interesting way.”

The Salvation Army UK is using dashboard-generated insights to power its decisions. Confidence in data accuracy enables leadership to act, reassigning budget to frontline services or opening a new service in a neighborhood in need.

Property teams document details such as roof type and past repairs, enabling management to estimate future maintenance needs. This foresight enables The Salvation Army UK to budget accordingly and avoid reactive decisions. “Rather than relying on lag measures, we can now look much more at lead measures so we can make decisions that will have the right outcomes,” Whitby says. 

Dashboards also report on and track wait times for fixes, allowing maintenance teams to prioritize the most pressing concerns. Power BI visualizes the most common types of compliance issues so the team can draft a strategy to address them efficiently.  These and other data-based insights are helping The Salvation Army UK get the most out of their properties to help people in need. 

Prioritizing privacy to keep vulnerable people safe

The Salvation Army UK offers a beacon of hope to some of the country’s most vulnerable people. It operates centers and accommodation for people struggling with homelessness or addiction and individuals fleeing domestic abuse or modern slavery. The organization’s services help people in need break free from unspeakable circumstances.

Microsoft Fabric connects to the church and charity's HR platform to identify staff members who need access to sensitive property details to do their jobs. Row-level security then restricts who can see the rows or sections related to confidential information. This granularity means The Salvation Army UK does not have to create separate dashboards for staff with differing roles, eliminating extra work while maintaining much-needed confidentiality. 

Further, Fabric’s complete security package patches vulnerabilities and monitors threats to both data in the platform and as it transfers to and from Power BI and other systems. 

Building for the future

Using technology to make the most of its properties represents just one way The Salvation Army UK is transforming its data stance. The organization is also leveraging Fabric and Power BI to provide the fundraising team with key metrics on the performance of campaigns, enabling them to make needed adjustments and pursue opportunities. Power BI connects to an internally developed Microsoft Power Platform app that collects Christmas gift requests, enabling the church and charity to track toy submissions for disadvantaged children. And Power BI dashboards enable The Salvation Army UK to work more closely with municipal governments and service groups to understand local needs, map existing resources by postcode, and plan future outreach.

The Salvation Army UK plans to develop additional use cases with Fabric and Power BI. “Now that we have a proper data warehouse in Fabric, it’s easy to scale,” explains Justine Concepcion, a data engineer who contracts with The Salvation Army UK. “We can add more data and connect other systems, sharing data among different departments like finance, HR, and more.” As data continues to break free from silos, The Salvation Army UK can better adapt to the community’s evolving needs. 

A solid foundation of high-quality data in interconnected platforms also sets up The Salvation Army UK to experiment more with AI. “We know that bad data leads to catastrophic effects when applied to AI, but good data will multiply the benefits we are seeing now,” Malinin says.  

While The Salvation Army’s work stretches back to the 1800s, it is dedicated to using today’s tools to make the biggest difference possible. “Throughout our history, we have embraced technology where it helps us deliver our mission,” Malinin says. “We are largely a Microsoft house, and with this technology, we are future proofing our charity.”

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