Adding birthday celebrations to your Slack organization is a very simple, yet effective way of boosting your team's morale, showing appreciation and building a happier team. In this article, we'll describe in detail how to set up your Slack workspace to have automated birthday celebrations for your team.
HR leaders know very well how daunting it is to look up their HRIS software daily, come up with a beautiful and personalized celebration message for their employees and keep track of every birthday — and they can't miss even one. If this is you, then keep reading, because it's never been easier to automate these steps.
1. Install Jolly for Slack
Jolly is a simple and intuitive celebration bot built to work seamlessly in your Slack workspace. Jolly will send a beautiful and joyful celebration message to the Slack channel on the day of the birthday or a work anniversary. Your team can then join in congratulating the beloved team member.
Installing Jolly is incredibly simple. You can find it on Slack App Directory, and from over there just press Add to Slack.
2. Create a Slack channel for celebrations
Jolly sends birthday celebration messages in a Slack channel. For that, you can create a new channel. We recommend naming it something like #birthday-celebrations. And yes, you can even create a private Slack channel.
3. Configure Jolly
After installing, you'll be taken to a setup page, where you'll go through a few steps to configure things like timezone and time when Jolly will send birthday celebrations. This takes just a few minutes to complete. During this step, select the #birthday-celebrations Slack channel you created.
4. Collect your team's birthdays
Jolly is now configured, but what's left? Well, collecting your team's birthdays! It's super simple! Jolly offers you a few ways of getting birthday information from your team. Simply open Jolly from your Slack sidebar and press Manage users.
Three primary ways to get birthdays into Jolly are:
- importing from an Excel file — this is the best way for large teams to get birthdays into Jolly. Simply update our Excel template and upload it. Done in 3 minutes!
- manually entering them — this is great for smaller teams, where you (the manager) can just enter all of them in a few minutes
- letting people enter the birthday themselves — great when you want to have your team enter the birthday themselves
You can find out how to collect birthdays at our Help Center.
How do the Jolly birthday celebrations look like?
So, now that your birthday celebrations are automated and configured, you might be wondering — how do these celebration messages look like? Below is an example of a few messages that are sent out by Jolly. There are bunch of messages and all of them are equally joyful. Jolly will select one at random when posting.
It's@Richardspecial day! Let's make it unforgettable! Happy Birthday! 
It's@Monicabirthday , and we're caffeinating our way to a fantastic day! And that's pretty much it. We've shown you how to set up birthday celebrations in your Slack workspace in under 15 minutes. It's never been easier.