The Contingent fights the foster care crisis with Microsoft low-code and AI solutions

Davidson County, Tennessee—home to Nashville, the Country Music Hall of Fame, and the Grand Ole Opry—is also confronting an urgent need for foster families. One woman had answered that need by opening her home to three youth who had been removed from their homes. When her own mother fell ill, though, she had to abruptly end the placement. In the past, a shortage of certified foster families might have led to separating the two biological siblings from their foster sibling. This time, an innovative technology system helped identify a family just down the street that could be trained and certified to welcome all three children.

“The siblings didn’t have to be separated. They’re all in the same schools, with the same case workers, and are still having meetings with their parents to work toward reunification. That may not have happened if we didn’t have that couple, and we may not have had the couple without this technology,” says Kathleen Clancy, Director of Every Child Tennessee, about the Microsoft-based solution. The system is shared by Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services, the Tennessee Governor’s Faith-Based and Community Initiative, Oregon-based nonprofit The Contingent, and Every Child Tennessee. “The technology is allowing us to build a system that is actually keeping up with the pace of the problem. That simply means that when a child needs a home, there’s a home available.”

Every Child Tennessee has partnered with The Contingent to develop and deploy an innovative technology system to help close the gap of unmet foster needs. The comprehensive set of Microsoft-based tools identifies community-specific gaps, targets marketing for the most in-demand types of foster families, facilitates the process of qualifying and monitoring the foster family licensing process, and increases the conversion of interested families into ones ready to welcome children in crisis.

Using a combination of the Microsoft productivity suite, low- and no-code platforms, and AI-powered solutions, technology is empowering the “heroes” who step up to help children who need temporary or long-term homes, says Ben Sand, CEO of The Contingent.

As a result of using this technology, some partner organizations have seen a significant increase in the number of people they help become foster families. “This is what happens when technology connects unbelievable public servants, an organization with a mission to serve kids and families, and people volunteering to open up their homes,” Sand says. "Microsoft technologies allow us to help people say ‘yes’ in an urgent way to meet the needs of kids experiencing the most traumatic moments of their lives.”

Understanding gaps to find the right homes for children

The Contingent is committed not only to increasing the overall number of foster families but also to ensuring the “right” homes are available when needed. “We don’t want a child in the worst moments of their life to leave their social structure, start a new school, split from their sibling groups,” Sand says. “We want to have more than a home for this child tonight. We want to have the ideal home.”

A custom Microsoft-based solution enables stakeholders in Tennessee, Oregon, and Arkansas to analyze the disconnect between children’s needs and the availability of foster families in real time. Power BI pulls current data from The Contingent’s secure Microsoft Dataverse to provide up-to-the-minute gap analysis dashboards.

Data from Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services such as children’s locations, ages, behavioral needs, and more illustrate who needs a home and the kind of placement where they will do best. At the same time, the solution shows where inquiries from prospective foster parents originate and whether those families are willing to foster children with the greatest needs. Those views present a snapshot of how newly recruited foster parents can address the needs and bridge current gaps.

Dashboards are dynamic, empowering The Contingent, Every Child Tennessee, and partner organizations to access the insights they need. Power BI empowers users to “slice the data a bunch of different ways,” Clancy says, for example on a county-by-county basis. This helps organizations filter out extraneous data and focus on the information they need to close the gap.

The Contingent uses Microsoft 365 Copilot to help build these Power BI dashboards. The AI assistant contributed to the automation infrastructure that facilitates data transformation, restructuring massive quarterly state reports to align with the nonprofit’s data model.

Copilot has revamped the data transformation process, which used to take a staff member several weeks to complete. With the AI assistant, this quarterly step now takes just a day.

“AI has streamlined our ability to build the infrastructure to consume large amounts of data from states, then tie them together in a way that makes sense,” says Kelsey Byrd, Chief Product and Innovation Officer at The Contingent. “That means we get results to the teams finding foster placements faster.”

The granularity of these displays empowers digital marketing and on-the-ground community recruitment of foster families to meet specific needs. Clancy says, “We’re attempting to solve a massive problem that changes every day. We finally have technology that enables collaboration and matches the urgency of the problem.”

Harnessing data to recruit foster families

Data suggest that just 5% of the U.S. population would consider becoming a foster family and only 1% would follow through. “You’re looking for a needle in a field of haystacks,” Sand explains. “We needed to implement some new strategies to meet this need, and that’s where Microsoft came in.”

The Contingent built a web platform with Microsoft Azure, Power Automate, Dataverse, and Power BI to create Every Child Tennessee, in partnership with the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, to ensure foster placement organizations qualify and enroll more foster families faster.

A custom CRM that The Contingent built with Microsoft Power Apps holds records for every potential foster parent, which are automatically created through an online inquiry. The low- and no-code platform multiplies the efforts of a very small engineering team, enabling them to get immeasurably more done than they could on their own.

Within the Power Apps CRM, The Contingent customer experience experts fill in details during initial conversations with prospective foster families. Staff assign “lead scores” to high-intent individuals and those who would meet the biggest gaps, such as homes willing to take in children with higher behavioral needs.

Power Automate then distributes leads among the Department of Children’s Services and other foster placement organizations. The Contingent used GitHub Copilot to custom-build a portal in Azure App Service for each organization, prioritizing the views and dashboards they need for their work. Each organization’s portal draws from the same Dataverse source, ensuring everyone gets complete, verified information.

Placement organizations can see and record details from key touchpoints of the inquiry process, from first conversation through first child placement. Vitally, a Power BI dashboard within the portal provides an overview of the process. “That’s a level of visibility states just haven’t had,” Byrd says. “It allows us to diagnose problems and make changes quickly. That leads to better outcomes.”

These insights have transformed how Tennessee stakeholders work together to improve outcomes for children in foster care. “We’re now all seeing the same information and watching a real-time funnel,” Clancy says.

The web portals give placement organizations first-ever insight into rates of converting inquiries into certified foster families. Even better, the data shows where individuals drop out of the process, helping identify opportunities for improvement.

Every Child Tennessee used the portal’s bird’s-eye view to identify which partner organizations were most successful at each touchpoint, then interviewed them to develop protocols based on their effective practices. Every Child Tennessee then used its established relationships to disseminate these lessons. As a result, some organizations have increased their conversion rates, bringing more qualified families into Tennessee’s foster system.

“The data help those conversations not feel personal,” Clancy says. “Data helps them get to the goals they’ve set up for themselves and ultimately for the kids. This learning makes sure that any person expressing even a remote interest in fostering gets the full chance to say yes—because we need people to say yes.” 

Finding foster families for the highest need children

The Contingent uses Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to deploy targeted, responsive campaigns to recruit potential foster families. The nonprofit has crafted a series of marketing journeys tailored for specific geographies, interests, and demographics, surfaced by the gap analysis powered by Microsoft Dataverse, Power BI, and Copilot. For example, one journey might discuss the need for more families in a particularly high-need county and address the rewards of hosting sibling groups.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights automates the campaigns for potential families in these geographic regions with aligned interests. Marketing journeys are responsive, sending tailored follow-ups depending on recipients’ actions (such as not opening an email or clicking on a link). This granularity helps The Contingent raise engagement rates and provide the content potential foster families are most interested in. It serves potential foster families, too, supporting their unique circumstances and path to making this life-changing decision.

“People make decisions using technology now. We’re also using technology to get the right messages to the right people in the right communities at the right time, in a way that is most efficient and effective,” Sand says. That stretches every stakeholder’s dollars further, freeing up more budget for finding loving foster families. 

Responding to potential foster families faster

The Contingent supports foster care systems in Tennessee, Oregon, and Arkansas, with plans to expand further. “We’re working on solving these problems at a global scale,” Sand says.

One challenge in this approach is that each state has a different protocol to connect foster families with children in need, as well as different requirements for licensing and approving homes. The Contingent used to employ state-specific staff to interview potential foster families. Now they use a Copilot agent to empower customer experience employees to discuss the foster family journey in any of the states they serve.

The Contingent developed an agent using Copilot Studio with scripts tailored to each state. These scripts guide customer experience staff through all questions each state requires and provides information potential foster families frequently want, such as the minimum dimensions for bedrooms. Users can also ask the agent questions to surface relevant answers. This information used to reside in disparate SharePoint documents, requiring staff to hunt through multiple tabs to converse with a potential foster parent. This ease of use allows staff to remain attentive, engaged, and compassionate during a critical early interaction with prospective foster families.

Importantly, this AI tool enables the team to seamlessly support additional states in the future. “Copilot helps us scale the work that we’re doing,” Byrd says. “The agent means every member on the team is up to speed and able to engage with leads from every state we work with. This makes us responsive when volume upticks or goes down.”

Dynamics 365 builds relationships and manages outreach, Power Platform connects data and workflows, and Copilot helps teams act faster within resource constraints. This integrated technology ecosystem makes it possible to find not only safe foster homes but also the placements best suited to the needs and well-being of each child. Clancy says, “I’ve been in this work 20-plus years. We have created something where we’re finally catching up with the problem. It feels really significant.”

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