Case Study: National Trust achieves unified conservation data visibility and faster decision-making with Microsoft Azure

Conservation charity develops custom apps, unifying processes, driving conservation goals, and enabling accurate measurement of conservation investment success

National Trust is a 120-year-old UK conservation charity that protects 250,000 hectares, 500+ historic sites and 775 miles of coastline, supported by thousands of staff and volunteers. Managing that spread—often in remote locations—relied on a decade-old Java system, manual pen-and-paper data collection and Excel reports, which produced low user adoption, fragmented processes and slow, inconsistent measurement of its Conservation Performance Indicator (CPI).

Working with Microsoft partner eBECS, National Trust built two custom PowerApps backed by Azure SQL and Power BI to replace the legacy system. Delivered in eight weeks, the solution delivers near–real-time data, unified workflows and improved visibility into CPI, reduced administration to about 25 people, and is being trialed across sites—enabling faster interventions, better-informed decisions and more cost-effective preservation work.

National Trust

Jon Townsend

Technology and IT Architect