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Every 5 minutes

Post new form responses in Slack

Each new response appears in your channel with every answer labelled by its question.

Runs
Every 5 minutes
Apps
Google Forms
AI
Not needed
Access
read (forms.responses.readonly, forms.body.readonly)

Send this to your assistant

Create a ClickRuntime automation: every 5 minutes, check my Event Signup form for new responses and post each one to #events in Slack with the question titles.

Paste it into your assistant. It tells you what it will send or change before it runs live.

First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.

Why use it

Why teams use this automation

A volunteer coordinator runs a sign-up form for a food bank, and a shift gets filled only if someone sees the response in time. The responses sit in the Responses tab of Google Forms, and the built-in email option sends a bare notice with no answers in it, so she has to open the form, find the new row and read it. Last weekend a driver cancelled at 7 pm and nobody saw it until Monday.

Every 5 minutes, ClickRuntime asks Google Forms for responses that arrived after the last one it saw, using a timestamp filter. It matches each answer to its question title, formats them as a readable message such as Name, Shift and Phone, and posts it to the Slack channel you choose.

Event organizers, support teams and recruiters use the same setup for booking requests, bug reports and job applications.

What you get out of it

  • The team sees answers, not just a ping

    A message with the actual replies lets someone act without opening the form. A cancellation, an urgent complaint or a high-value request can be handled from the Slack message itself.

  • Faster replies to the people who wrote

    People filling in a form expect a response. Posting new submissions to a channel the team already watches cuts the time before someone picks it up from hours to minutes during working hours.

  • Nothing is missed in a busy week

    Checking a response sheet is easy to forget when ten other things need attention. A notification in a place the whole team looks makes a submission a shared responsibility instead of one person's chore.

  • Shared visibility, one conversation

    When the response lands in a channel, colleagues can reply in the thread, claim it with an emoji or tag someone better placed to deal with it. That avoids two people answering the same request.

  • Every response arrives exactly once

    The automation remembers the last timestamp it handled, so a response does not appear twice and none is skipped between runs. The channel stays a clean log of everything submitted.

How it works

What happens, step by step

  1. Every five minutes, ClickRuntime checks your Google Form for responses submitted since the last check.

  2. It matches each answer to the question it belongs to.

  3. Each new response is posted to #events with every answer labelled by its question, like "Which session?: Workshop B". Responses already posted are never sent again.

Before it runs live

  • Connect Google Forms

What you get

RunsEvery 5 minutes
Post new form responses in Slacktoday, 9:00Succeeded
Slack · #eventsNew Event Signup response *Name*: Sam from Northwind *Which session?*: Workshop B

Build your own

Need it to work differently?

This template is a starting point. Copy the prompt and change it, or describe a different automation from scratch, with your own conditions, more apps or an AI step. Your assistant writes it, tests it and runs it on ClickRuntime.
  • Your own rules

    Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.

  • Any number of apps

    One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.

  • AI where it helps

    Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.

  • On a schedule or on each event

    Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.

Changes you can ask for

  • Act only on the items that match your own rules, and skip the rest
  • Add an AI step, for example to summarize, sort or draft a reply
  • Add another app, for example also send it to Slack
  • Combine it with other Google Forms steps into one automation

Under the hood

The code that runs this automation

This is the Python script that runs each time the automation starts. Your AI assistant writes it for you when you send the prompt, and you allow each step in your assistant. To change how the automation works, describe the change to your assistant and it updates the script for you. For every function it can use, see the script reference.
new_response_notification.pyexample
from clickruntime import on_trigger, credentials, http, notify, state, report_fetched

FORM_ID = "1FAIpQLSdExampleFormId"  # Event Signup
API = f"https://forms.googleapis.com/v1/forms/{FORM_ID}"

@on_trigger
def run(event):
    headers = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {credentials.connection('google', 'work')}"}
    since = state.get("since") or "2026-01-01T00:00:00Z"
    responses = http.get(f"{API}/responses", headers=headers,
                         params={"filter": f"timestamp > {since}"}).json().get("responses", [])
    report_fetched(len(responses))
    if not responses:
        return {"new": 0}
    form = http.get(API, headers=headers).json()
    titles = {i["questionItem"]["question"]["questionId"]: i["title"] for i in form["items"] if "questionItem" in i}
    for r in sorted(responses, key=lambda r: r["lastSubmittedTime"]):
        lines = [f"*{titles.get(q, q)}*: {', '.join(x.get('value', '') for x in a['textAnswers']['answers'])}"
                 for q, a in r.get("answers", {}).items() if "textAnswers" in a]
        notify.slack("New Event Signup response\n" + "\n".join(lines), channel="#events")
    state.set("since", max(r["lastSubmittedTime"] for r in responses))
    return {"new": len(responses)}

FAQ

Common questions

How quickly does a response show up in Slack?
It is checked every 5 minutes, so a new response usually appears within 5 minutes of being submitted. Google Forms does not push instant notifications to outside tools, which is why a short polling interval is used.
Does it include file uploads and long answers?
Text, choice and scale answers are included in the message. A file-upload question gives a link to the uploaded file in Drive, and very long answers are shortened in the post with the full text kept in the form's response sheet.
Can I send responses from different forms to different channels?
Yes. Each form can be pointed at its own Slack channel, for example volunteer sign-ups to one channel and complaints to another. Tell your AI assistant which forms and channels to connect, and the approval step shows the mapping.
What permissions does it need?
read (forms.responses.readonly, forms.body.readonly). Nothing else in your accounts is used.
Does it need AI?
No. It runs without AI, so it doesn't use your plan's AI allowance.
How many runs does it use?
One run each time it checks. Checks that find nothing new and stop right away aren't counted.
Can I change how it works?
Yes. Describe the change to your AI assistant, for example a different schedule, channel or filter. It updates the automation, tests it and tells you what changed.

Set up “Post new form responses in Slack” from your assistant

Copy the prompt above, or connect your assistant first. Free plan, no credit card.