This article explains how to enable the Birthday widget in your channels and how each person sets their own birthday, so no one on the team misses a reason to celebrate.
🎯 Who this article is for: Channel owners and editors who want to enable the Birthday widget, and all users who want their birthday to show up correctly.
đź”’ Permissions: Only channel owners and editors can turn the Birthday widget on or off. Any channel member, including viewers, can see it once it's enabled.
1. Overview
Small moments build culture. A birthday shout-out in the right channel, at the right time, tells people they're seen, even in a company that's grown past the point where everyone knows everyone.
The Birthday Widget brings that moment into the channel itself. Once enabled, it sits in the right sidebar and lists any channel member celebrating a birthday, complete with their name, avatar, and a birthday emoji, so teammates never have to check a separate calendar or count on someone remembering to post a reminder.
Today, the Birthday Widget lives in channels. A page version is coming soon, and this article will be updated to cover it once it's released.
2. Use cases
- Keep team culture alive without the manual work: Team leads and members no longer need to track birthdays in a spreadsheet or set personal reminders. Once the widget is on, it surfaces birthdays automatically for everyone in the channel.
- Give growing teams a personal touch: As a company scales past the point where colleagues know each other by name, the widget keeps small, human moments visible inside the channels people already work in.
- Bring distributed teams closer together: Remote and hybrid teammates who rarely share a physical office still get the same chance to celebrate each other, right where they already collaborate.
3. Before you begin
- You must be a channel owner or editor to enable the widget.
- Birthdays only appear in the widget once a member has entered their birthday in their own User Settings.
- Enabling the widget affects the whole channel. Anyone in it, including viewers, will see birthdays that are set.
⚠️ Important: The Birthday Widget ignores the People Directory setting that controls whether birthdays show on user profiles. That setting is managed by admins from Admin Settings → People Directory → Birthday. Since turning the widget on is a choice made at the channel level, it displays a member's birthday even if that admin setting is turned off.
4. How to enable the Birthday Widget
- Go to a channel where you're a channel owner or editor.
- Navigate to Channel Settings.
- Scroll to Sidebar Widgets.
- Toggle Birthdays on.
The widget appears in the right sidebar and lists any member celebrating a birthday, whether they're a channel owner, editor, or viewer.
5. How to set your birthday
For all users:
- Click your avatar in your intranet's main navigation.
- Go to User Settings.
- Under My Information, scroll to Additional Information.
- Enter your birthday in dd/mm/yyyy format.
Your settings save automatically, no confirmation step needed.
6. Best practices
- Enable it where the team already feels close-knit: Project channels, department channels, and small team channels create a more personal moment than a large, company-wide feed.
- Prompt new members to set their birthday early: Add it to your onboarding page or new hire checklist, so setting a birthday becomes part of getting set up in your intranet.
- Respect that sharing a birthday is a choice: Since setting a birthday in your intranet is what triggers the widget, nobody appears unless they've chosen to add the information themselves.
7. Frequently asked questions
Can the widget pull birthdays from Google Workspace or another provisioning source?
Not yet. It only works with birthdays entered directly in your intranet. A mappable birthday field that connects provisioning data is something we're exploring for the future.
Who can see the Birthday widget once it's enabled?
Any channel member can see it, including viewers. Only owners and editors can turn it on or off.
What if I don't want my birthday to show up anywhere?
Simply don't add it in User Settings. Nothing appears in the widget unless you've entered your birthday yourself.
Can channel viewers turn the widget on?
No. Only channel owners and editors can enable or disable sidebar widgets, including Birthdays.
8. Troubleshooting
My birthday isn't showing in the widget
Check that you've entered it in User Settings under Additional Information, and confirm it's formatted as dd/mm/yyyy.