How SwifterOps saved an education nonprofit over 700 hours in a day's work

The Challenge

NGOs need to be very efficient to function well, but because they are always stretched for time and money, they seldom find the time to take a step back and optimize their process. This tradeoff between urgent work and process optimization is common in for-profit companies too.

In this case, a national education nonprofit approached SwifterOps because they knew they were wasting too much time and could not continue on this path. A team of 8 people had just spent 3 whole days producing receipt certificates for the beneficiaries of their school meal programs.

The Solution: From Many Hours to a Few Clicks

We wish we had been approached sooner to save the nonprofit this ordeal. Theirs was a common problem: How to fill in documents with information from a spreadsheet. There are many tools to address this problem, from mail merge in Microsoft Word, to online software like Documint. However, the nonprofit used Google Workspace for Education, so the solution had to be compatible with that, and it had to be free.

Our team has expertise in Google Workspace, and we knew that we could quickly build a solution for the NGO using Google Apps Script. That's exactly what we did. We wrote a script that allows the nonprofit to choose a Google Docs document as a template, make a spreadsheet of the data to fill in, and press a button to generate a PDF for each row of data. We even added an option to send the PDF as an attachment to an email with its own template.

Although our work was fairly technical, the result couldn't have been easier to use for the nonprofit. In the end, the process looked like this:

The Result: Over 700 hours/year saved

The nonprofit replaced a time-consuming, manual process that took 64 hours a month with little more than the click of a button. It was barely a day's work for us, so of course we were happy to provide this service for free, and thus support the NGO's mission.

And this script didn't just optimize a single process. We made our solution generic, so it could be used with any template. Therefore, the nonprofit has been able to use it to generate many other documents. We found out about this weeks after the project was done!

Conclusion

Sometimes a simple optimization project can have an outsized effect on your organization's efficiency and performance. These opportunities aren't always in plain sight as they were for this nonprofit, and it might be helpful to hire a professional to perform a diagnostic of your operation. Furthermore, it helps to be familiar with the tools necessary to achieve your goals, and have the technical skills to use them effectively. Finally, you need to put in the time to actually implement a solution. You know what we are aiming at...

Ready to Streamline Your Own Processes?

Automated document generation is just one of the many projects we have worked on. Check out our case studies for more examples, or contact SwifterOps today and discover how we can help you automate your processes and achieve similar results!