Automating Certificates for Community Organizers in 93 Countries

Google’s student community organizers ran programs across 93 countries, and each of them needed a personalized certificate. Producing and sending those by hand took hours every cycle, time that should have gone into the programs themselves.

The challenge

Automate certificate generation and delivery so the team could spend its time on the community, not on copy and paste.

What I did

I wrote a Google Apps Script mail merge that took a spreadsheet of organizers, generated a personalized certificate for each one and emailed it directly. No manual documents, no manual emails.

What changed

Certificates went out automatically to organizers worldwide, and the process could be reused every cycle.

What I took away

The smallest scripts often have the best return: the busywork disappears, and so do the mistakes that come with it.

More from this work: the nitty gritty on the Google page.