Social services nonprofit Barnardo’s enhances client support through Microsoft technology

Meeting the increasing need for essential social services

During the COVID-19 pandemic, 11-year-old triplets Anna, Jane, and Thomas found themselves living in an emergency shelter. Their mother, Sarah, had fled an abusive relationship and didn’t know where else to go. They were safe, but the kids “had to leave everything they loved behind,” says Sarah. (The family’s names have been changed to protect their privacy.)

“We were referred to Barnardo’s, which, if I’m honest, truly turned our lives around and helped us all feel so much safer,” Sarah continues. Support from Barnardo’s, the children’s social services nonprofit that serves young people and families across the United Kingdom, helped them find and afford permanent housing and connect with mental health services. “The support we’ve had from the program during such a tough time was just amazing for me and my family.”

Barnardo’s assists hundreds of thousands of clients every year through crisis intervention, foster care and adoption, substance misuse counseling, asylum, and much more. 

“We are growing significantly,” says Kieron Thorpe, Head of Operating Technology at Barnardo’s. “That is sad, in a way, because it means frontline services are more in demand.” Pandemic-related funding challenges, along with increased need for social services, meant the nonprofit had to find ways to more effectively reach more people. It is doing that by replacing outdated and unstable legacy systems with Microsoft Cloud solutions.

The technology improvements have revolutionized how the nonprofit works, and the Microsoft stack became even more important during the COVID-19 pandemic. “By adopting Microsoft 365, the Microsoft Cloud, and Surface devices, technology supports what we’re doing and where we’re going as an organization,” Thorpe says. “To be blunt, if we hadn’t switched, we wouldn’t have been able to deliver our services during the pandemic.”

Empowering frontline workers to focus on children and families

“At Barnardo’s, our focus is on improving the lives of children and other people who need our help the most,” explains Remi Martins-Tonks, Head of Data and Insights at Barnardo’s. “There’s always a need for that. But in recent years, Barnardo’s is in demand more than ever.”

Frontline workers who run the nonprofit’s more than 800 services across the United Kingdom provide that direct support. “One of the biggest impacts of technology we’ve seen is simplifying how our staff members work,” Thorpe says. “We’ve given them tools that are more powerful, quicker, and more compatible with everything they need to do their job.”

Barnardo’s provided its field workers with new Microsoft Surface tablets, rolled out with the support of the Microsoft Partner Network member CDW. The nonprofit chose Surface devices because they are several pounds lighter than comparable products, without sacrificing screen size. That way, frontline users can go wherever they’re most needed, from schools to community centers to homes.

By using cloud-based apps on a Surface instead of manually taking notes, staff members enter data into secure platforms while they work. For example, they record notes for children receiving mental health support and for families seeking asylum. Entering information in the moment reduces the risk that a vital piece of information doesn’t get recorded or is input incorrectly.

Now that staff members don’t have to return to a central office to rekey notes in an on-premises platform, they save two to three hours each day, Thorpe estimates. The reduction in administrative work protects staff members from burnout and allows them to spend more time and energy doing what they’re passionate about: helping young people. 

“All those changes take away frontline users’ worry that they’ll be tied up with tech problems,” Thorpe says. “Now they can simply focus on their job.”

Delivering better programming—together

“We don’t do anything in a vacuum,” Martins-Tonks says. “There’s a whole system that wraps around a person, from school and social services to family members and the justice system. This context informs how we design services and work with partners and collaborators.” 

Switching from legacy technologies to the Microsoft Cloud made sense because close to 100 percent of the organizations Barnardo’s works with also use Microsoft products. “That’s the power of Microsoft technology—It allows us to all speak the same language,” Thorpe says. “Using the same solutions makes it easier to share anonymized information securely without massive time and effort to ‘translate’ from one system to another.”

Data visualization and analysis enables Barnardo’s to better understand clients so the nonprofit can match them with the right partner organizations. For example, with the See, Hear, Respond initiative Barnardo’s ran in 2020 and 2021, frontline staff members collected, anonymized, and input key client information into Power BI, including ethnicity, age, geography, reason for referral, number of hours of support, and more. “That information changed the grassroots community organizations we reached out to,” Martins-Tonks says. “It informed how we triaged cases.” 

For example, the data showed that children who needed more than 15 hours of support services had complex and overlapping challenges. In response, Barnardo’s created a new team to match young people with the right community partner. “This supports children to secure more suitable, longer-term service to help them,” says Elif Urgan Yilmazer, Research and Evaluation Lead at Barnardo’s.

The data also suggested that the initiative could reach more underserved young people by going to them, rather than inviting them into a social services building, for example. Barnardo’s coordinated outreach in the streets, communities, and other locations where children and families were already spending time. “This provided children and young people with an opportunity to build a relationship with a worker on their own terms and at their own pace,” Urgan Yilmazer says. 

These connections matter. As one Barnardo’s service user says, “I felt valued and listened to for the first time ever.” 

Winning and expanding contracts to reach more young people

The majority of Barnardo’s income flows from social care contracts with local governments across the U.K., the National Health Service, and other government agencies. These contracts are often large-scale, multi-year agreements, which means that winning them is absolutely critical to sustaining the nonprofit’s work. 

Adopting Microsoft technology supports securing these contracts, Thorpe says. For one thing, bids typically include strict reporting and data handling expectations, especially because the work involves vulnerable populations. “When we say we’re using the Microsoft 365 tech stack, they know we’re working with the market leader in sensitive document management,” he continues. “It makes winning bids a lot easier.”

Using Microsoft 365 capabilities and Power BI, Barnardo’s can satisfy reporting requirements more easily. The information that field staff members record automatically syncs to Power BI via the cloud, so all data is live. Barnardo’s uses the reports function within Power BI to publish a report for funders that includes data from that day, rather than using information with a lag of a month or more. In short, “Power BI helps us to clearly demonstrate the good work we do,” Martins-Tonks says.

Barnardo’s also tracks outcomes over time to determine the efficacy of programs, such as transitioning out of houselessness or measures of self-esteem. “Data enables us to talk about the value of what we provide,” Martins-Tonks says. “We demonstrate that we’re not only helping individuals, but that improvements have benefits for society, the economy, and beyond.”

Having clear, up-to-the-minute data also enables Barnardo’s to prove a continued need and secure additional funding to deliver services. For example, in 2020, Barnardo’s showed the steep increase in referrals for needed support to one funder, the Department for Education. Concrete numbers, rather than anecdotes, helped demonstrate that many more children needed help. 

“The data we collected, shown in Power BI, demonstrated there was even more work that needed doing,” Martins-Tonks says. “It helped decision makers understand that we couldn’t stop at six months, which was the original scope of the contract.”

The Department for Education ended up lengthening the contract by four months, and Barnardo’s reached an additional 57,000 young people with vital social services as a result. “If we didn’t have that information, we may not have been recommissioned,” Martins-Tonks says. “Barnardo’s is about filling gaps where people don’t have the support they need. Recommissioning the contract helped children who didn’t have anyone to turn to. Microsoft technology was an enabler for that.” 

Find out more about Barnardo’s on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.