Writing Apps Script code with UM-GPT to customize and automate mass email campaigns

Merchant Services, Treasurer's Office

Problem

Merchant Services, a sub-unit of the Treasurer’s Office, manages credit card processing and PCI compliance for the university. Faced with the project of sending a mass email campaign comprised of 200+ records with seven different fields requiring personalization, the team sought a process by which to avoid needing to manually prepare each email. Coding a script to automate this task, while viable, also presented an issue as the team did not have a background in coding.

Audience

Administrative assistants and other staff who need to create highly personalized mass emails using data from disparate sources.

Outcome/Impact

To address these issues, the team utilized UM-GPT and Google’s Apps Script, a platform which allows users to automate tasks across Google products. Even without prior coding experience, the team was able to use UM-GPT to write the necessary code in Apps Script to merge the data from Google Sheets and automate delivering the compiled emails through Gmail. Additionally, UM-GPT proved useful for finding and formatting Excel formulas in the earlier phase of preparing the data and spreadsheets. The team is now prepared for potential future mass email campaigns that would similarly require a high degree of personalization.