Every March, Microsoft MVPs face the same annual admin challenge. This year, I decided to automate it.
If you’re a Microsoft MVP, you know the renewal process well. Once a year — typically in March — you log into the MVP portal and work through your activity profile, adding all the community contributions you’ve made over the past twelve months. Blog posts, YouTube videos, speaking engagements, podcast appearances, user group sessions, guest articles — everything needs to go in.
The work itself is fine. The problem is the hunting. Tracking down what you’ve done across a year’s worth of platforms, cross-referencing dates, finding URLs, and manually entering each entry is genuinely tedious. It can easily eat up half a day.
This year I built a solution using Claude CoWork — and it’s changed the way I approach renewal completely.
The Problem With MVP Renewal Admin
The Microsoft MVP program is fantastic. It recognises technical community contributors across a huge range of Microsoft product areas — Azure, Microsoft 365, AI, developer tools, and more. But the renewal process has always been manual by design: you log your own activities, and Microsoft reviews them.
The challenge is that most MVPs contribute across multiple platforms. I personally publish on my blog, run two YouTube channels (my personal Azure channel and the Turbo360 channel), appear on podcasts, speak at events, and engage on LinkedIn. Pulling all of that together each March means going back through months of activity across every one of those platforms.
It’s not difficult — it’s just time-consuming. And that’s exactly the kind of problem AI tools are built to solve.
Building the MVP Renewal Skill in Claude CoWork
Claude CoWork is Anthropic’s desktop AI tool. One of its most powerful features is the ability to build reusable skills — custom workflows that Claude can execute on your behalf, including browsing the web, reading files, and using the Claude Chrome extension to automate browser interactions.
I built an MVP Renewal Skill that automates the activity-gathering process end to end. Here’s what it does:
- Scans my blog for any posts published in the current MVP cycle. It picks up the title, URL, and date of each post automatically.
- Searches my YouTube channels using the Claude Chrome extension — both my personal Azure channel and the Turbo360 channel — and compiles a list of all videos published during the period.
- Checks LinkedIn for any relevant posts, articles, or event appearances that qualify as MVP activities.
- Searches the wider web for other contributions I may have made — guest blog posts, podcast appearances, user group mentions, and so on.
- Incorporates a manual list of known speaking events that I provide directly. Some activities — like in-person conferences — are hard to discover automatically, so I give the skill a head start with a quick list.
Once it’s gathered everything, the skill compiles all of this into a structured HTML activity report — an interactive checklist I can work through to add each item to my MVP profile.
What the Output Looks Like
The HTML report groups activities by type — blog posts, videos, speaking events, podcast appearances, and so on — and orders them by date within each category. Each entry includes the title, URL, and date, along with a checkbox so I can mark items as done as I work through the portal.
It’s the difference between staring at a blank MVP portal and trying to remember everything you’ve done, versus starting from a complete, organised list that just needs to be transferred.
The time saving is significant. What previously took me several hours of research now takes a few minutes of review.
What I Want to Build Next
The current skill produces a report for me to work through manually. That’s already a big improvement — but it’s not the end of the story.
My next goal is to go a step further: using the Claude Chrome extension to actually drive the MVP portal directly, logging activities as draft entries that I can simply review and approve. Rather than copying and pasting from a checklist into the portal, Claude would do the data entry as well.
And looking further ahead, I’m excited about what this could look like with Microsoft Copilot, Copilot CoWork, and MCP server integration. Imagine a version of this that runs monthly rather than annually — keeping your MVP profile current throughout the year, so that by the time March arrives, there’s almost nothing left to do.
The Skill Is Available on GitHub
I’ve shared the MVP Renewal Skill on GitHub so any Microsoft MVP can use it as a starting point. You’ll need to update it with your own blog URL and YouTube channel links, but the core logic is all there.
If you’re a Microsoft MVP spending hours on renewal admin every year, it’s worth taking 20 minutes to set this up once.
Watch the Full Walkthrough
I’ve recorded a full video walkthrough of the skill in action — showing how it searches, what the output looks like, and how I work through the report.
▶️ Watch on YouTube:
If you have questions or want to share how you’ve adapted the skill for your own renewal process, drop a comment on the video or reach out on LinkedIn.
