Situation:

In one of my internships, I worked at a very early-stage ed-tech company that connected MBA students to Linedusty leaders in India. They used to run cohorts in a small sizes. I was a marketing intern at that point in time.

Task:

After every cohort, there would be 5 interns working to create and dispatch certificates. There would be one designer who would finalize the certificate template and 2 interns would create certificates in PDFs and 2 interns would mail each certificate manually.

Action:

When I was asked to do the same. I requested for a time period of 4 hours to find out if there is an easy way to do it. In those 4 hours, I got to know what are APIs and there are premade extensions that can make our lives a lot easier. So I integrated an extension to a google sheet and programmed it in such a way that Certificate would be created with the First Name+Last Name of the participant and a copy will be stored in google drive with the Full Name as the file Name and also the certificate (PDF) would be sent to the respective participant.

Result:

In this way we achieved an 87.5% reduction in time and a 60% reduction in effort.

1. Brought down the time required for creating and dispatching certificates from 4 hours to 30 minutes

2. Decreased the effort for the same from 5 interns to 2 interns