Automating a PDF Assessment with a Serverless App

The Problem

New Hope Christian Community had a PDF Spiritual Gifts Assessment with over a hundred questions that a user would fill out, and after the form was filled out, their gifts would be calculated according to their question answers.

This assessment process was time consuming for New Hope’s staff as it was an entirely manual process to determine gifts and then process that information.

The Resolution

To improve the efficiency of this process, we built a web app to entirely replace their old PDF flow. All of the questions would be on a web form and the user would provide their email to get their results once they submitted the form. The assessment results would be automatically calculated, so there would be no manual work to figure out their spiritual gifts.

The web app was built so it could be hosted serverlessly on AWS to keep costs extremely low. The front-end was built with React/TypeScript and hosted on AWS Cloudfront/S3. The backend was built using Ruby on Jets. The design is simple and straight forward.

The Outcome

The month-to-month hosting costs for the app have been extremely low and it is saving around 15-30 minutes per form submission for New Hope’s staff. What would have been a highly manual and time consuming process has now been streamlined into a clean user experience for all parties.

Although it is a relatively ‘simple’ application, the impact was big for those who used it, and that is what matters. It was great working on this project and helping save time for the folks at New Hope Christian Community!