Red Cross uses Microsoft Power BI to better understand what topics and issues occupy Norwegian youth

Understanding the youth in Norway

Red Cross is the world’s largest humanitarian network and helps people in need all over the globe. The organization detects and prevents disasters, responds quickly to provide support during crises, and contributes to local communities. Volunteers form the foundation of the Red Cross and its success is based on their tireless work as well as their ability to mobilize swiftly to reach out to those in need.

The Red Cross in Norway offers many ways to support children and youth. Among these services is Kors på Halsen, whereby young people can anonymously reach out and discuss what’s on their mind via phone or web chat free of charge. Although the identity of the caller is anonymous and the conversations are confidential, the Red Cross accumulates an enormous amount of data based on topics, issues, age, and geography. The organization wanted to transform the data into useful information and asked Capgemini to help.

Data-based reports provide clarity

Capgemini and the Red Cross began by using Microsoft BI to visualize the accumulated data, and determined the needs of the users in order to determine the scope of the project. Then, the partners iteratively developed this summary into a visual representation of the data. This report focused on highlighting the core of the data stored by Kors på Halsen, demonstrating how the inquiries made to Kors på Halsen were distributed across age, gender, location, and topic.

The report was designed to mimic a website so that Red Cross could more easily use it. Idean, Capgemini’s design branch, was consulted with regards to the layout and produced a clean and easy-to-understand report. A user can choose between two different views of varying complexity, with digestible visuals such as maps and word clouds clearly highlighting the differences in distribution across the country and across topics.

The report is fully interactive, so the user can choose to drill down into a topic, an age group, a gender, or a part of the country to look at a smaller subset of the data. Since the service is anonymous, the solution implements a safeguard, whereby data will not be shown if a user filters the report to less than five data points in a single category. This is to maintain the aspect of anonymity upon which Kors på Halsen is built.

Visualizing data to define the way forward

The solution is tailormade for the Red Cross’ needs and based on Microsoft Power BI. The enormous amount of data that the Red Cross gathers through Kors på Halsen is now visualized in a way that can easily explain what children and youth in Norway want to discuss. In addition, the visualized statistics can be shared with journalists, politicians, and decision makers who can use the information to create better conditions for young people in Norway.

Capgemini is a strategic partner to the Red Cross in Norway. As part of its ambition to be a positive architect of the future, Capgemini has developed the Kors på Halsen solution for the Red Cross on a pro bono basis. The project team that developed Kors på Halsen are a part of CapLab, Capgemini´s way of organizing consultants between projects.