Telegram onboarding#

Two minutes per person, sitting next to them, on their own phone. Never by instructions on paper.

This never stops#

The first sign-up meeting is the biggest batch, not the job. Onboarding is a standing task, and it belongs to the Assistants. It comes round whenever:

• somebody moves in, turns 18, or finally says yes after six months of watching;
• somebody gets a new phone — see below, this is the big one;
• somebody comes back for the summer, or is here for a season;
• somebody reinstalls Telegram, or clears out their chats.

A village that onboards once and considers it done has a member list that quietly rots.

Nobody presses the button to test it#

Say this out loud, because the instinct is exactly wrong.

A press alarms the whole village, every time. Twenty people at a meeting each having a go is twenty alarms in an hour. Do it casually as people join through the year and the village gets an alarm every few days for no reason — and then stops reacting. A village that has taught itself to ignore the alarm is worse off than one with no alarm at all.

Test alerts belong to announced drills, and to nobody else.

The four steps#

1. Join the group Red Escudo <Village>. Somebody already in it adds them.
2. Open Botón Escudo and press START, once. It’s the one big button in an otherwise empty chat. Press it and the alert buttons appear, and stay there for good.
3. Turn notifications on, for the group and for the button. Off silent, off vibrate-only. This is the step everything else rests on.
4. Look at the buttons. Don’t press one. What they need to leave with is knowing where the button lives and that it never moves.

Then tick them off the list.

Proving the phone makes a noise#

You still have to check step 3, and you can, without alarming anyone.

An alert arrives as an ordinary message in the group. So any message in the group tests exactly the same notification. Type “prueba” and watch.

• At a sign-up session: once, at the end, with everyone still sitting there. Every phone in the room should make a noise; fix the ones that don’t before anybody leaves. That is the whole value of the session.
• For one person, any Tuesday: post a message in the group, or send them one directly. No alert, no drill, nobody disturbed.

What goes wrong#

• A new phone silently undoes all of it. The most common failure by far. Telegram comes back with their chats, so they look fine — but notifications are back to default, and often the button chat is gone. Anyone who mentions a new phone gets onboarded again, from step 1.
• They join the group but never open the button. Invisible, because they still receive every alert through the group and seem perfectly signed up. What they can’t do is raise one — and they’re usually the person who most needs to.
• The phone has been on silent since March. Also invisible. Test, don’t ask.
• They clear their chats and the buttons vanish. They come back by opening Botón Escudo and typing anything at all.
• Somebody presses it “to see what happens”. Expect it. It’s a false alarm, cancelled like any other, and nobody is told off — no exceptions. Just don’t build it into the procedure.
• The phone is genuinely too old, or there isn’t one. Don’t fudge it. Note the name — that’s who phones and devices are for, and meanwhile they’re on the phone tree.

Setting up the group and the software in the first place is a different job, belonging to the Technical lead and written out in full.