If you run a cohort, an accelerator or a training programme, a big share of your week goes to the same jobs: sending reminders, chasing forms, counting who showed up and rebuilding the same report. I have done this work for a startup academy with more than 70 founders and for learner communities at ALX with thousands of people. The hours add up fast.
Here are the five workflows I automate first, in the order I would do them, with tools most programmes in Kenya already pay for or can use free.
1. Onboarding a new participant
What goes wrong: people sign up through a form, then wait. Someone on the team copies their details into a spreadsheet, sends a welcome message by hand and adds them to the WhatsApp group and Google Classroom one at a time. Some people fall through the gap in the first week.
The fix: one application form feeds one participant list. When a row is marked accepted, a welcome email goes out with the schedule, the group link and the first task. A short SMS or WhatsApp message confirms it. The team only handles the exceptions.
2. Session reminders
What goes wrong: attendance drops in week three because people forget, and the reminder message goes out late or not at all when the coordinator is busy.
The fix: schedule reminders once for the whole programme. A message the day before and one an hour before each session, with the link or venue. SMS works well for people who mute busy WhatsApp groups. This one workflow held attendance steady in every cohort I have supported.
3. Attendance and progress tracking
What goes wrong: nobody knows who is falling behind until it is too late to help. Attendance lives in three places: a Zoom export, a paper list and someone's memory.
The fix: every session writes to one tracker. Attendance, assignments and a simple status per participant: on track, at risk or missing. Anyone marked at risk gets a personal call that week. At ALX, that call was the difference for many learners who later graduated.
4. The funder or partner report
What goes wrong: the report takes a full day every month. Someone pulls numbers from forms, spreadsheets and chats, then formats them by hand. Mistakes slip in and the report goes out late.
The fix: once attendance, progress and milestones sit in one tracker, the report can build itself. A template pulls the numbers, and the programme lead adds two paragraphs of story and sends it. What used to take a day takes an hour.
5. Alumni follow-up
What goes wrong: the programme ends, everyone celebrates, and the graduates disappear. Six months later a funder asks where they are now and nobody knows.
The fix: set follow-ups at graduation. A short survey at one month, three months and six months, sent automatically, with results landing in the same system. Add a jobs and opportunities message to the alumni group on a schedule. I run alumni relations at AfricaHackon, and this is the part most programmes skip.
How to start without breaking anything
- Automate one workflow at a time. Run it for two weeks, fix what breaks, then move to the next.
- Keep a human in the loop. Automation sends the reminder. A person makes the call when someone is at risk.
- Write down the process first. If you cannot describe the steps on one page, you are not ready to automate them yet.
- Use what people already use. In Kenya that usually means WhatsApp, SMS, Google Workspace and M-Pesa. Tools your participants have to learn cost you attendance.
When a spreadsheet stops being enough
Forms and spreadsheets carry most programmes a long way. Once you run several cohorts at once, need partners or funders to see live numbers, or take payments, a small custom system starts to pay for itself. That is the kind of programme system I build.
Questions programme teams ask me
Do participants need to install a new app?
No. The best automations reach people on the channels they already use: SMS, email and WhatsApp. Every new app you ask participants to install costs you some of them.
Can we do this without a developer?
Most of the first four workflows can be set up with Google Forms, Google Sheets and a scheduling tool for messages. You need a developer when the pieces have to talk to each other reliably, when payments are involved or when several team members edit the same data every day.
What should we automate first?
Session reminders. They are quick to set up, participants feel the difference in the first week and attendance is the number everything else depends on.
If your team is losing hours to any of these five, tell me which one and I will show you how I would fix it.
