Sending Certificates for Wilmette Institute

The Wilmette Institute teaches about the Bahá’í faith and works to bring positive change to the world. They value diversity and have a unique approach to education that encourages students to think deeply, take action, and grow. They're making a difference in their communities.

When I arrived at the project certificates were being sent manually, and were backed up several months behind schedule. The automation of the process of sending certificates transformed the process to consistent and timely deliveries on a weekly basis.

Part of the challenge was creating a list of new certificate earners manually from over fifty ongoing courses each overlapping at different times throughout the year. Certificate creation and mailouts also had to be done one at a time, and required great care so as to not send the wrong name or course in a great series of copy-pastes.

The project leveraged Googles Puppeteer library for browser automation, in order to web-scrape an updated list of student completions each week. New certificates were programatically generated, and a report generated for review, before sending. Newly sent certificates were then automatically uploaded to the Wilmette Institutes digital archives.

This solution matched the requirements of the project and brought consistency and ease of mind.