A friendly scheduling bot for your Telegram group - set it up in about 20 minutes, no coding required.
It posts RSVP polls before each meeting, sends reminders, wishes people happy birthday, and tracks attendance automatically - all driven from one Google Sheet.
Perfect for a church discipleship group (DG), a small group / community group (CG), a sports team, a club, or any group that meets on a schedule.
Four jobs, all running quietly in the background from your sheet.
Posts a poll before every event - “Coming / Not coming / Joining online…”.
An optional nudge on the day (or X days before) the meeting.
Automatic happy-birthday posts to the group.
A dashboard that fills itself in from poll answers.
Everything is controlled from tabs in your copy of the sheet - you never touch the code.
Two things, and about 20 minutes.
Follow these in order. Each one builds on the last.
đź“„ Make your copy of the Poll Bot sheet
Click the “Make your copy” button above. Give it a name (e.g. “Friday DG - Poll Bot”). From now on you only work in your copy.
Making a copy automatically brings the code (the “Apps Script”) with it - but the automatic schedule does not copy over. You’ll switch it on in Step 6.
In Telegram, open a chat with @BotFather. Send /newbot and follow the prompts - you’ll pick a name and a username ending in “bot”. BotFather replies with a bot token that looks like 1234567890:AAH…xyz.
Keep this token private - it’s the password to your bot.
Open your group → Add members → add your new bot. Then make the bot an Admin of the group.
Admin lets the bot post polls and messages, and read poll answers reliably.
The quickest way: open Telegram Web in your browser, click into your group, and look at the address bar. The negative number after the # is your Group ID:
https://web.telegram.org/k/#-1001371481828
Copy that whole number, including the minus sign. It looks like -1001371481828 for larger groups, or a shorter -123456789 for smaller ones.
Can’t spot it in the URL? Add @RawDataBot to the group for a moment - it prints the chat ID right in the chat - then remove it.
Send any message in the group, then visit https://api.telegram.org/bot<TOKEN>/getUpdates (replace <TOKEN> with your token) and look for "chat":{"id":-100…}.
Go to the Settings tab of your copy:
Reload the sheet. A new menu - “Small Group Assistant” - appears in the top bar.
Click Small Group Assistant → Send Poll Manually. The first time, Google asks you to authorize the script - approve it (it’s your own copy).
If you see “Google hasn’t verified this app,” click Advanced → Go to (project) → Allow. This is normal for personal Apps Scripts.
Now turn on the daily schedule: Extensions → Apps Script → click the clock icon (Triggers) → Add Trigger, twice:
morningTasks - Time-driven, Day timer, e.g. 7–8 am.eveningTasks - Time-driven, Day timer, e.g. 8–9 pm.morningTasks sends polls, reminders and birthdays, and tidies up. eveningTasks collects the latest poll answers.
Calendar tab - each row is one meeting:
Birthdays tab (optional) - a row per person: Name, Day, Month, optional Year, and a note. On someone’s birthday the bot posts your birthday message.
Settings tab preferences:
0 = on the day).{{Name}}, which is swapped for each person’s name).The smart, low-stress way to make sure everything works before you unleash it on your real group.
You can learn and experiment freely - try polls, reminders and birthdays - without spamming your real group while you figure things out.
In Telegram → New Group → name it e.g. “Poll Bot Test” → add yourself and at least one other member (a friend, or your own second account). Telegram needs at least one other member besides the bot. Then add your Poll Bot to it and make it Admin (same as Step 3).
Get the test group’s ID (same method as Step 4) and temporarily put it in Settings → Telegram Group ID (E29).
In the Calendar tab, add a row dated today or tomorrow, with a Poll Question, a couple of Answer options, and a Reminder message.
Small Group Assistant → Send Poll Manually. Confirm the poll appears in your test group, and vote on it from your account(s).
Run it again later - or run the eveningTasks function directly: open Extensions → Apps Script, pick eveningTasks in the function dropdown, click Run. Then check that the Poll Responses / Attendance tabs fill in.
In Settings, set “Send reminders?” to On and reminder days to 0. In the Apps Script editor, run the morningTasks function and confirm a reminder posts (it replies to the poll).
Add a Birthdays row with today’s day/month, set “Send birthday texts?” to On, run morningTasks, and confirm the birthday message posts.
Reminders and birthdays have no menu button, so you trigger them for testing by running morningTasks manually in the Apps Script editor.
Once you’re happy: set Settings → Telegram Group ID back to your real group’s ID, remove or fix up the test rows in Calendar/Birthdays, and you’re ready. You can delete the test group (and remove the bot from it) afterwards.
If you used one bot for both, you don’t need a new token - just switch the Group ID. If you’d rather fully isolate testing, create a separate test bot with its own token via @BotFather.
Once it’s running, there’s very little to do.
Don’t delete old polls in the Polls Sent / Poll Responses tabs - it can corrupt past attendance records. Hide rows instead.
The usual suspects, and how to fix them.
Tick these off and you’re live.
Keep your bot token private - if it leaks, go to @BotFather → your bot → Revoke token, then paste the new one into Settings.