How Barnardos uses a data lake and Power BI to improve reporting

An organisation with purpose and constraint

As New Zealand’s largest children’s charity, Barnardos provides a wide range of essential services for children and families across the country. Its work spans early learning and education, social work and family programmes, school-based support, and care services, supporting more than 25,000 children and families each year.

Much of this work takes place in complex and sensitive environments, supporting people in vulnerable situations and requiring a high degree of care, trust, and responsibility.

Like many not-for-profits, Barnardos operates with a small internal IT team supporting a workforce of around 800 people distributed across the country.

Data plays an important role in governing and managing services and meeting critical compliance and funding reporting requirements. At the same time, it holds the potential to offer deeper insight into outcomes, effectiveness, and long-term impact.

Balancing that potential with limited capacity and funding has shaped a careful, pragmatic approach to technology and data. That journey has been guided in part by Una Lynch, who has spent more than 20 years at Barnardos and has been closely involved in the organisation’s technology and data evolution.

From CRM adoption to data foundations

Barnardos’ use of Dynamics 365 began more than a decade ago, with Fusion5 supporting the initial implementation. The early focus was on improving efficiency and consistency in how services were delivered and managed.

Over time, use of the CRM expanded steadily. More services were brought onto the platform, and it became central to how care and social services were delivered day to day. Social workers, care teams, and managers used the system to record activities, manage cases, and track the support being provided to children and families.

This naturally led to large volumes of sensitive data being captured through everyday work, increasing the importance of security, access control, and governance.

For many years, reporting was primarily operational and compliance focused. Funding requirements and service obligations meant that producing accurate, timely reports rightly took priority.

As use of the platform continued to grow, reporting requirements became more complex. Alongside Dynamics 365, Barnardos also relied on a separate third-party system to manage its early childhood education services. With data spread across two core systems, producing consolidated reports required significant reconciliation effort.

Una describes this ‘as the point where the data challenge became harder to ignore.’ Rather than continuing to work across disconnected sources, Barnardos engaged Fusion5’s data team to collaborate on a more sustainable approach.

Fusion5 designed and implemented a data lake solution, with data flows pulling information from the two primary source systems: Dynamics 365 and the early childhood education platform. This created a single, structured foundation where data could be captured, organised, and governed.

Power BI was introduced as the reporting interface, allowing teams to access data from both systems through a single platform and produce consolidated reports without ongoing manual reconciliation.

This phase of work focused on practicality rather than ambition. The goal was not advanced analytics, but reliability, consistency, and ease of access, simplifying how data was accessed and used across the organisation.

Building capability without creating dependency

With the data foundations in place and reporting simplified, attention shifted to capability.

Rather than relying on ongoing external support, Barnardos focused on building confidence and independence within the team. Fusion5 supported this through targeted Power BI training, helping people understand how to work with the data, create reports, and answer questions as they arose in day-to-day work.

This approach created a small group of internal go-to users who could build reports, explore data, and support others, without adding unnecessary burden to already stretched teams. It reflected a clear decision to build independence rather than dependence on external support.

Over time, this has increased confidence in how data is accessed and used, while still allowing Barnardos to draw on specialist expertise when deeper guidance is required.

From reporting to insight

As confidence in reporting has grown, so too has the conversation about what more could be learned from the data already being captured.

Much of Barnardos’ day-to-day work involves detailed case management. Social workers record actions they want to achieve for families, alongside the activities that support those outcomes. Appointments, conversations, follow-ups, and interventions are all logged as part of the work being done.

Individually these records serve an operational purpose. Taken together, they represent a much bigger story about how support is delivered and what contributes to positive outcomes for children and families.

For Una, the opportunity now lies in connecting those dots over time and understanding what the data is really saying, while recognising that meaningful insight depends on consistency, structure, and trust in how the data is captured.

For now, reporting remains focused on governance and compliance. But the foundations are in place to extend further when the organisation is ready.

Support that fits the organisation

Alongside this evolving capability, Fusion5 continues to support Barnardos through regular system and data health checks, as well as on-demand advice when new questions or challenges arise.

These reviews help ensure that reporting remains secure, governed, and fit for purpose as usage grows and requirements change, while allowing issues to be identified and addressed early.

The value of the relationship lies in having trusted expertise available when it is needed, without creating ongoing dependency. Barnardos retains ownership of its systems and data, drawing on specialist support at the right moments.

A measured path forward

Barnardos’ data journey continues to evolve, shaped by the realities of a purpose-led organisation working in complex and sensitive environments.

What has changed over time is not just the technology in place, but the confidence to use it well. Confidence in the foundations that have been built, in the people who work with the data every day, and in the ability to ask better questions as capability grows.

It is a reminder that meaningful progress does not always come from fast deployments or short-term initiatives. Sometimes, it comes from steady steps taken over time, supported by the right expertise at the right moments.