Adding Jolly to Slack channels

In this guide, we'll look at how to configure Jolly's celebration channels to your organization's needs.

How it works

Jolly sends joyful birthday/anniversary celebration messages in a Slack channel. You can easily configure which Slack channels you want Jolly to send celebration wishes to. Whenever you create that link between Slack channel and Jolly, you create a celebration channel.

You're allowed to create as many celebration channels as you wish, but your account must always have at least one celebration channel.

To create a new celebration channel, you have to select which Slack channel you want to send celebrations in, for example #team-birthdays or #team-celebrations. You also have to choose whether you want Jolly to send celebrations only when channel members have their special day or whenever anyone from the Slack organization has their special day. Read more about Limiting to Slack channel members.

Because of this approach, you can fine-tune Jolly to work perfectly, regardless the team size. In Examples, we'll see three common ways of setting Jolly up.

Manage celebration channels

Creating a new celebration channel

1

Open Jolly from your Slack sidebar

2

Press the "Home" tab

3

Press "Add to another channel"

Creating multiple celebration channels is limited to customers on a paid subscription plan.

4

Select the Slack channel and configure

Managing celebration channel

1

Open Jolly from your Slack sidebar

2

Press the "Home" tab

3

Find the channel you wish to update

4

Press the "Manage" button

Removing celebration channel

1

Open Jolly from your Slack sidebar

2

Press the "Home" tab

3

Find the channel you wish to remove

If you're not seeing this options, you likely don't have another channel created. You must have at least one channel.

4

Press the "Remove" button

User's channel preferences

If a user receives celebration messages in multiple Slack channels, they can configure which channels they want to receive celebration messages in.

For example, if the Engineering manager is a member of #engineering-team, #design-team and #management-team, and all three channels have Jolly configured, the person will receive celebration messages in all three Slack channels. Jolly allows them configure where exactly they want to receive celebration messages.

To update the channel preferences, do the following:

Limiting to channel members

As we've already discussed, when you create new Jolly celebration channels, you can select whether you want Jolly to send celebration messages to that Slack channel whenever:

• anyone from the organization has a birthday/anniversary
• anyone from the Slack channel has a birthday/anniversary

As we'll see in Examples, limiting to channel members is great for larger teams that want to group celebrations by team, and therefore the Slack channel.

When you don't limit Jolly celebration channel to Slack channel members, Jolly will send celebration messages in that channel for every birthday/anniversary in the organization. For example, this is great for smaller/medium teams that just have the public #celebrations channel and all birthday/anniversary messages go there.

If you limit to channel members, Jolly will keep the channel members in sync as they are added and removed from the Slack channel.

Adding to private channels

Jolly does support private Slack channels. However, before you can add Jolly to a private channel, you'll have to invite Jolly to join the Slack channel.

If Jolly cannot access the channel, you'll get a private DM from Jolly when creating/managing celebration channels warning you about the situation.

Inviting Jolly to Slack channel

To add Jolly to the private Slack channel, open the channel and type: /invite @Jolly.

You can also follow Slack's guide on inviting people to join the channel at https://slack.com/help/articles/201980108-Add-people-to-a-channel

Examples

Smaller organizations that want to have all celebrations in a single Slack channel

This option is great for organizations with e.g. 50 people, where all celebration messages are sent to a single Slack channel. In this case, most people in the organizaton still likely know each other and join in congratulating each other on the special day.

Medium/larger organizations that want to separate celebrations by team and Slack channel

This option is great for medium/larger organizations where people don't know everyone from the organization. We recommend doing this for teams with over 50 people.

In this case, birthday/anniversary celebrations will be separated by the team — teams will only join in congratulating the birthdays/anniversaries of their team members.

In this case, we also recommend people to also add coworkers from other teams that they wish to receive celebration reminders to their list of favorites.

Smaller organizations that want to use Jolly as reminders to managers in a private Slack channel

This option is great for organizations with e.g. 50 people, where managers don't want Jolly to send public celebration messages to people but rather just want to be informed about birthdays/anniversaries of their team.

In this case, Jolly will send birthday/anniversary messages for everyone in the Slack organization to a private Slack channel that's only visible to team managers.