Award for Hitachi Solutions team at the Microsoft & Make a Wish UK Power Platform Hackathon

The award was given for building an app which would address a key issue that Make a Wish UK were facing.

On the 14^th & 15^th March, Microsoft and Make a Wish UK came together to hold an event where they invited partners to use the PowerApps platform to solve some of the issues facing charities today.

Make a Wish UK explained some of the problems they face on a day-to-day basis to set the scene for the event. The charity was founded in 1986 and grants wishes to children and young people fighting life-threatening conditions. In 2015, they granted their 10,000^th wish, which can range from meeting celebrities or heroes to having magical experiences and creating special memories.

One True Wish Finder

One of the special things about Make a Wish is that they aim to seek out and grant the one true wish of every child they meet. However, this is often difficult to achieve because their “Wish Visitors” only have an hour or so to meet, form a relationship and understand each child’s ideas for their wish. Our challenge was to give the Wish Visitors a mechanism that would allow them to gather high-quality information about the Wish Child that would help the Wish Visitors prepare and make the most of their visit as well as capturing data on the day to start shaping the true wish of the child.

The Solution

We took the challenge and broke it down into three key areas to help the Wish Visitor; before the visit, during the visit, and after the visit.

Initially, the Wish Child or a family member can request a wish using Jot Form. At this stage, they could upload images, drawings, etc. as well as provide background information about their desired wish. All of this information is saved into the Common Data Service using Microsoft Flow.

Once in CDS, Azure text analytics is used to analyse the keywords from the wish request. This is to help the Wish Visitor understand the key areas to talk to the Wish Child about when visiting them along with the rest of the information captured earlier. All of this information is available on the Canvas app and will be used to help the Wish Visitor prepare before the visit.

During the visit at the Wish Child’s home, the Wish Visitor is able to clarify and capture more detail about the true wish of the child via the canvas app. Pictures can also be taken at this stage and saved to help illustrate the child’s true wish.

Once the Wish Visitor has left the home, they are able to capture any follow-up actions after the visit. This can be anything from a recording of their voice via the canvas app to creating follow up tasks, which are saved in CDS for future.

The Team

The team consisted of three Hitachi Solutions consultants (Jag Bohania, Craig Fitzgerald & Chiheb Laabidi) accompanied by James Tobin who is a Technologies Solutions Professional at Microsoft. We worked really well together debating which challenge to solve and designing how we were going to build it. We even incorporated Azure DevOps to plan the work and assign tasks to ensure we all kept on track.

Final thoughts

We are extremely pleased to have won an award at the Microsoft Hackathon following 2 days of learning, teamwork, and fun! Truthfully winning an award is a bonus, the most important thing was leveraging the power platform to address a genuine problem that Make a Wish UK has and build them a solution they could start using today.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank Microsoft and Make a Wish UK for hosting this incredible event. It was exciting to see all the innovative solutions using a wide spectrum of the platform to address real-world problems. The power platform really has opened up a new way to tackle challenges and deliver solutions.