Microsoft Low-Code Power Platform helps to conduct European schools survey

The ESPAD project is to collect comparable data on substance use among students of the same age in as many European countries as possible. The studies are conducted in schools among students turning 16 during the year of the data collection.  In Ireland, ESPAD is conducted by www.tri.ie.

TRI came to Dovetail requesting assistance in the sampling of a subset of Irish schools and thereafter organising the outreach to selected schools and alternatives.

The second part of this, the outreach campaign, involved dozens of steps, and a branching lifecycle.

We recognised that there would be new branches added to the lifecycle while the outreach was conducted, and that these new branches were unknown at the outset of the campaign.

We therefore suggested a Rapid Application Development solution developed using Microsoft PowerApps. Using this approach, we could quickly and easily add new fields and new queues as the need arose.

We developed a PowerApp solution, which classifies each school by status, showing, for example, queues for “Initial contact”, “First followup”, “Send survey training materials”, and so on – at this point in time there are around 20 queues, with new data collected at each step.

The alternative to a custom solution for the client was the management of the outreach in Excel files, which would have quickly resulted in dozens of columns which would be very difficult to manage.

Our PowerApp solution was much quicker to develop than a fully custom .Net solution, and was simpler and cheaper than subscribing to and configuring a SaaS CRM.

The solution has proved extremely useful to TRI, who are delighted with the system. Surveys will commence in selected schools in April 2024.