How ANS Helped Shelter Improve Reporting with a Scalable Data Platform
Watch the Shelter Customer Success Story Video
Background
Shelter is a charity dedicated to defending the right to a safe home and addressing the impacts of the housing emergency through campaigning, support, and advice, with a strong belief that home is fundamental to well-being.
With demand for its services continuing to rise, the organisation relies heavily on effective supporter engagement and fundraising to deliver critical advice, services, and advocacy. In this context, access to timely, accurate, and trusted data is essential to enabling Shelter to operate effectively and maximise its impact.
Challenge
Shelter faced significant challenges managing numerous disparate data sources from various fundraising and donation platforms, which complicated their ability to understand supporter engagement, giving behaviours, and to build stronger relationships, as well as to deliver timely, accurate data for decision-making.
Supporter data took between 3–5 days to reach Shelter’s CRM, preventing timely engagement and reducing the effectiveness of campaign activity.
Data processing relied on 12–15-hour overnight batch windows, restricting the organisation’s ability to respond quickly to real-world events or time-sensitive fundraising initiatives.
Solution
ANS partnered with Shelter to implement Microsoft Fabric that integrated seamlessly with Shelter’s existing Microsoft-first technology stack.
The project involved collaborative upskilling, staggered rollout, and close cooperation with ANS developers and architects, resulting in a flexible, scalable data platform with pipelines and Power BI dashboards that show accurate, timely information about the organisation’s supporters.
At the core of this transformation was the implementation of a Lakehouse architecture, leveraging Microsoft Fabric capabilities to consolidate disparate data sources into a single, governed environment.
Outcomes
Shelter now benefits from reliable, high-quality data written to their CRM, improved reporting for end users, and the ability to integrate and analyse diverse data sources. This is allowing Shelter focus resources effectively and identify trends with a data platform built to scale with the organisation.
Data latency has been reduced from 3–5 days to near real-time, with updates now available up to three times per day.
In addition, the onboarding of new data sources has been dramatically accelerated. What previously took 2–3 months can now be achieved in approximately two-week sprints, enabling Shelter to respond more quickly to new opportunities, campaigns, and evolving business needs.
The elimination of 12–15 hour overnight processing windows has further improved operational efficiency, allowing data to be processed and accessed continuously rather than in delayed batches.
Shelter hopes to build on these strong foundations in the near future with advanced modelling, such as propensity models and service performance analysis.
