ERG Watercooler Bot

Keeping an ERG community engaged between live events takes consistent effort. Discussion prompts spark conversation, but remembering to post them regularly becomes another task for volunteer leaders who are already stretched thin.

This ERG Watercooler Bot automation handles community engagement for you. Store a library of discussion questions in a Google Sheet, and Zapier will randomly select one and post it to your ERG Slack channel on whatever schedule you choose—every week, every two weeks, or monthly.

The system runs completely hands-off once you set it up. You maintain the question bank in your spreadsheet, but you never have to manually post again. Your ERG stays engaged, and volunteer coordinators reclaim time for the community work that matters.

The automation triggers on a schedule you define—the default is every two weeks on Tuesday mornings, but you can adjust frequency, day, and time to match your ERG's rhythm. When it runs, a Formatter step generates a random number between 1 and 100. That number becomes the lookup value for a Google Sheets search step, which finds the matching row and pulls the question from column B. Finally, the automation posts the question to your designated Slack channel as a bot with customizable username and icon.

Employee Resource Groups can use this to maintain async community engagement without coordinator burnout. ERG volunteer leaders benefit from consistent prompts that help distributed members build connection. Multi-chapter ERGs running separate channels for different locations can duplicate this automation with location-specific question banks to maintain engagement across all chapters without multiplying coordination work.