outreach
How to Find Telegram Contacts of School Directors in Russia and CIS
You need to reach school directors across Russia or the CIS but there's no directory with their Telegram handles. Here's the actual workflow that gets you there.
You've got an edtech product, a supply deal, or a training program to pitch — and a list of 400 schools across three regions. Zero of them have a public "contact us on Telegram" button. Their websites list a landline number from 2011 and an email that bounces. You're stuck.
This is the exact problem outreach teams run into when they try to sell into Russian or CIS education systems. There's no LinkedIn-style directory of school administrators. There's no public registry of "school director + Telegram handle." You have to build it yourself — and most people give up after page three of Google results. You don't have to.
How many school directors in Russia or CIS actually have a findable Telegram account?
Based on phone-to-Telegram enrichment data, roughly 50% of phone numbers in CIS regions convert to an active Telegram username. That means if you can get a verified phone number for a school director, you have roughly a coin-flip chance of turning it into a direct Telegram contact — no cold email, no gatekeeper secretary, no guessing. The hard part was never Telegram. It's getting the verified phone number in the first place.
Why school directors are harder to find than typical B2B decision-makers
Schools aren't registered the same way commercial companies are. A private school might be registered as an ANO (autonomous non-profit) or a municipal budgetary institution, which means it doesn't show up cleanly under standard OKVED industry codes the way a logistics company or a retailer does. Public school directors are often listed on regional education department websites — but those pages are static, outdated, and never include a mobile number or messenger handle.
That's exactly why generic lead-gen tools fail here. You need a workflow built around two separate problems: finding who the director actually is, and then converting whatever contact detail you find into something you can message.
The workflow: registry data → phone number → Telegram username
The most reliable method pulls from the same approach used to find any business owner or decision-maker in Russia and the CIS — just pointed at educational institutions instead of companies. It works in three stages, orchestrated by an AI assistant like Claude or ChatGPT connected to two tools via API.
Pull institution and director data from a business registry. Many private schools and education centers are registered as legal entities, which means registry providers like DataNewton can surface the listed director, founder, or legal representative — along with contact details on file.
Connect your AI assistant to the registry provider. Feed it your DataNewton API key so it can query and filter institutions — by region, by legal entity type, or by name if you already have a target list.
Connect the same assistant to CRMChat. Your CRMChat API key lives in Settings → API Keys. Once connected, the assistant can drive CRMChat's contact-lookup tools directly instead of you manually running searches one by one.
Run the lookup sequence. The assistant finds the registered director or administrator for each institution and retrieves an associated phone number where available.
Convert phone numbers into Telegram usernames. This is the step people skip and then wonder why their "contact list" is just a spreadsheet of unreachable phone digits.
Export to CSV and load into your outreach sequence. A clean list with name, institution, phone, and Telegram handle — ready for personalized messaging, not a cold blast.
CRMChat includes a phone number to Telegram username converter that automates this exact enrichment step, turning a static phone number into a live, messageable Telegram handle. CRMChat also provides contact-lookup tools that an AI assistant can drive programmatically, so the entire registry-to-Telegram pipeline runs without you manually cross-referencing spreadsheets for hours.
What to do when a school isn't a registered legal entity
Public municipal schools often aren't structured the same way as private institutions, so registry lookups won't always return a clean match. When that happens, fall back to a secondary method: Telegram group parsing. Regional education Telegram chats, parent-teacher community groups, and local school-district channels frequently include staff and administrators as members.
Search for groups using region-specific keywords like "директора школ [region]" or "образование [city]."
Use a group member parsing tool to extract usernames and bios from matched communities.
Cross-check extracted names against your registry list to confirm you've identified an actual director, not a parent or teacher.
Prioritize groups with visible admin activity — directors who post in these chats are far more likely to respond to a direct message.
CRMChat's Telegram Group Finder lets you search by keyword and get a curated list of matching groups sent straight to your Telegram inbox, which is a faster way to surface regional education communities than manually searching Telegram's native search.
What should go into your outreach list once you have the contacts?
A phone number and a Telegram handle aren't enough on their own — you need enough context to personalize the first message, since a cold "Hi, interested in our product?" to a school director gets ignored or reported just as fast as any other spam pitch.
Director's full name and official title
Institution name, region, and type (public, private, ANO)
Verified phone number and converted Telegram username
Any public signal of relevance — a recent post, a grant announcement, a program they're already running
Source of the lookup (registry vs. group parsing) so you can track which channel converts better
Why this beats scraping or buying a generic list
Bought contact lists for education sectors in the CIS are almost always stale — directors change schools, legal entities get restructured, and phone numbers get reassigned. Building your list through live registry lookups paired with real-time phone-to-Telegram conversion means every contact reflects current data, not a list that's been resold five times since 2022.
If you're also prospecting business registries for other industries alongside education, the same AI-orchestrated workflow applies — swap the OKVED filter and you're sourcing a different vertical entirely. For teams running this at scale, the CRMChat Help Center walks through the full setup with screenshots, and developers can wire the lookup sequence directly into existing tools through the CRMChat API.
