How To Set A Slack Birthday Reminder With CultureBot in 3 Easy Steps

Birthday are a great opportunity for an excuse to celebrate your coworkers. It doesn't have to be stressful either – you can easily never forget another birthday with tools that are already designed for today's remote work environment. With plenty of options out there, let's take a look at how to quickly implement one of our personal favorites – CultureBot.

1. Install CultureBot

The first step is to head over to the CultureBot homepage and click the big "Add to Slack" button. This will then prompt you to add CultureBot to your Slack workspace as seen below.

After you click 'allow' you'll land. on the CultureBot app homepage inside of Slack.

2. Configure the Birthday Celebration Section

Once installed, you'll find yourself looking at the CultureBot app. Although CultureBot can do a bunch of things for building remote company culture, we're only focused on the birthdays for the purpose of this tutorial. To get started with birthday setup, just check the box (seen below) that says "Click to configure sending of celebratory birthday messages to your employees on their birthday."

Next you'll see a few options to setup the way the bot will be sending birthday celebrations. The settings seen below are the primary ones you'll need to setup.

• First, pick a Slack channel (to send the actual celebrations to when it comes time – you can also choose to send messages directly to your employees, but that is less common as you most likely want to share the celebration and acknowledgement with everyone – right?).
• Next, select the hour of day for the birthdays to send into the Slack channel above (self explanatory)
• Third, you'll see the options circled below in the bottom right for collecting birthdays and editing the celebration message that gets sent. We'll talk about the former in a second, but for now, go ahead and click 'edit message' and design a message that inspires joy in your employee's hearts (:
• Additionally, there is an option to send a birthday gift as well, if you choose to add this on (it's optional) it will send whatever you've typed into to the employee via a direct message on their birthday (as well as a note to you, the admin, to fulfill the sending of said gift).
• Lastly, you can choose to check the little checkbox highlighted at the very bottom of the screen below to "automagically" send a message to new hires (added to Slack) to collect their birthday. This is great for those of us (aka most of us) who don't want to have to remember to collect birthdays like it's our main job!

3. Collecting and Sending Birthdays!

Collecting birthdays comes with a few options:

• Uploading via a spreadsheet (the first circled part of the screen seen below). Simply export a spreadsheet of your employee's birthdays and emails (that match the ones used in Slack) and we'll automatically users with their birthday. You can also request to do this via our programmatic API for those of you with HRIS systems that you want sending birthday information to CultureBot directly.
• Collecting using the Bot – this is by far the easiest and most recommended option. Simply by the click of a button (seen in the squared off section of the screen below) you can have CultureBot directly message your employees (in mass or individually) to enter their birthday. This is opt-in only (of course).
• Last (but very much not least) you can enter birthdays manually (last circled area below at the bottom). Although more time consuming, this is a great option for complimenting the collection strategy above in the case/event certain employees do not enter their birthday or forget to do so – you can simply add it for them! Just type their name in and a modal will appear to manually select the month and day of the birth date for that employee.  

So... what does the final celebration look like?