Membership & Attendance System

Background

I worked with one of the renowned NGOs in Penang — Penang Cultural Inheritors Society. They manage the Penang Chinese New Year celebration (Miao Hui) at George Town during the Chinese New Year festival every year.

They have hundreds of members and a few thousand volunteers each year. Handling the members and volunteers alone is a big challenge; thus, collaboration and productivity become important aspects for them to manage their work and communication effectively.

Past Projects

I led the technology group of the team a few years back, and we managed to move the whole organization into Google Workspace for non-profits and improved the organization’s work efficiency. We developed numerous automation applications. One of the transformations that we completed was on their membership system, whereby every time a new member joins, we automate the process of creating a Google Workspace account for each of them and automatically send them a welcome email with the account details. With more than 10 sub-groups for the event, we’ve enabled a dynamic group membership list, where the group leader receives a list of their members that updates in real-time any time a new member is assigned to the group.

Now

The organization started to grow, and they are now handling numerous events with hundreds of participants for each event. Hence, they wanted to systematically record attendance so that they could give rewards to those who actively participated in their program. In addition, they wanted a quick way of taking attendance, reducing the manpower and time needed for the attendance-taking and recording process.

I’ve identified their pain point and decided to try out something new — Google AppSheet to solve 90% of their problems. I managed to develop a system for their members where they could look at upcoming events and register while having their own profile and dynamic QR code to ease attendance tracking. They could easily access the official website of the organization by just scanning their own QR code.

As the organizer, they would be able to access and manage all the profiles, events, and attendance taking by just scanning participants’ QR codes or by searching their names and IC numbers, all within AppSheet. This transformation helped the team effectively reduce their workload by 30% on managing and tracking attendance, and they are 100% satisfied with the outcome of the transformation.

Efficiency is the new way of doing work in 2025.