Case Study: National Trust achieves unified, real-time conservation insights and cost-effective operations with Microsoft Power Apps

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

National Trust, a 120-year-old UK conservation charity managing 250,000 hectares, 500 historic sites, and extensive coastlines, faced fragmented, paper-based processes and an antiquated Java system that gave only 50% user adoption and made measuring its Conservation Performance Indicator (CPI) slow and error-prone. To modernize data collection, unify metrics across remote sites, and improve visibility and cost-effectiveness, National Trust turned to a solution built on Microsoft Power Apps (with Azure and Power BI integration) developed by partner eBECS.

eBECS delivered two custom Microsoft Power Apps applications backed by Azure SQL and Power BI in eight weeks, replacing manual Excel workflows with near‑real‑time data, unified dashboards, and streamlined administration. The Power Apps solution is already being tested across sites, reduces infrastructure maintenance to about 25 administrators, increases user adoption and decision-making speed, and lets National Trust better quantify conservation outcomes and reallocate resources to mission-critical work.

National Trust

Jon Townsend

Technology and Information Security Director