§ 01TL;DR
One 20-minute session became six months of automated weekly emails.
Pro bono work for a charity founder. We turned a manual weekly task into a one-script batch job and scheduled 28 broadcast campaigns into ActiveCampaign in 48 hours.
§ 02The brief
Big Debate Club is a £4.99/month subscription that sends parents weekly guided debates for children aged 7-14. The founder, Greg Sanderson, also runs Smart School Councils, a charity reaching 250,000+ young people across 700+ schools. Every Saturday morning he was logging into ActiveCampaign by hand, picking a topic, writing the email, and sending it. Not painful, but the kind of weekly tax that quietly steals attention from the work that grows the business. He booked a 20-minute slot at our weekly AI Office Hours and asked the obvious question: can this just happen automatically?
I want to stop manually sending weekly emails
so that I can focus on growing the business, not operating it
§ 03The work
From first conversation to live campaigns took 48 hours across three short phases: a 20-minute session to understand the product and the real constraint, a same-day content generation pass, and a Python script to push everything into ActiveCampaign via its API.
The insight: batch, don't automate
The obvious solution was a recurring automation that fires every Saturday and picks the next topic. That's fragile, needs hosting, and introduces a failure point every week. The better answer was simpler. Generate all the email content upfront, then schedule every campaign in one go. 28 debates equals 28 Saturdays equals roughly six months of content, all queued and confirmed before the first one sends.
Content generation
Greg's 28 debate topics already existed on the site. What was missing was the email packaging: a short parent-facing description and a subject line. We generated both for all 28 topics in one sitting using AI, anchored to his existing emails so the voice stayed his. The full table went back to Greg for review, a few tweaks landed, and the final CSV fed the script.
The script
ActiveCampaign doesn't support bulk-scheduling broadcasts through its UI, but the API does. We wrote a Python script that reads the content table and, for each debate, creates a scheduled broadcast campaign targeting Greg's subscriber list. A couple of bugs surfaced on the first run. We fixed them, added a preview mode so Greg could check everything before going live, and re-ran. 28 campaigns confirmed in seconds.
§ 04What we found
The constraint wasn't technical. It was knowing what was possible.
Greg had the content, the tool, and the API access. What he didn't have was the right person to ask, and the time to find out whether the obvious answer was the right one. The real value of the 20 minutes wasn't writing code. It was reframing the problem from "automate the weekly send" to "schedule six months in one go".
§ 05Impact
Saturday mornings are now free. When Greg writes new debates on the site, he runs the same script and the next six months are scheduled in seconds. No developer needed, no recurring cost, no platform to maintain.
I booked a 20-minute slot thinking I'd get a pointer in the right direction. Two days later, my Saturday emails were sorted for the next six months. Greg Sanderson, Founder, Smart School Councils