Make-A-Wish America: unified data, Copilot and an IT help bot

Manual reporting produced conflicting figures, and staff spent hours reconciling them. Each wish involves many steps, from fundraising and medical referrals to planning, which stretched staff capacity. The Wish Bank app for donated points and in-kind gifts needed a skilled developer for every change, and the organization holds sensitive family data, including medical diagnoses, that it must protect.¹

With partner Redapt, Make-A-Wish built a unified data platform in Azure with Microsoft Fabric as the single source of truth, and Power BI dashboards for every chapter. Wish Bank moved from an on-premises SQL database to Azure SQL Database and was rebuilt with Power Apps and Power Automate. Wish Helper, a generative AI chatbot built in Microsoft Copilot Studio and grounded through Azure AI Search on approved content, handles IT self-service. An Azure Machine Learning model flags donors likely to increase their giving.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is being rolled out to the national office and regional chapters for drafting, meeting notes and call transcription (the story describes it both as rolled out and as rolling out). Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Purview cover threat protection and data governance. Extending Wish Helper to HR and finance questions is planned.¹²

In our view, the case is more useful for its order of work than its results: unify reporting data first, then rebuild fragile line-of-business apps on low-code tools, then add Copilot and a help bot. A partner did much of the build, which suits nonprofits with small IT teams. The only published figure is bot usage, both sources are Microsoft pages, and the Microsoft blog mentions the case without numbers, so there is no evidence yet on fundraising or wish-granting outcomes. Smaller charities can get the reporting benefit from Power BI on existing data before a full platform move.