Set Up Custom Celebrations

Custom Celebrations lets admins schedule automated messages in Slack or Microsoft Teams to mark holidays, diversity and awareness days, and any fully custom date that matters to your team.

In this article:

Getting Started

Three Types of Celebrations

Setting Up a Celebration

Recurrence Options

Sending As Someone Else

Graphics and GIFs

Managing Your Celebrations List

All Templated Dates in CultureBot

Getting Started

In Slack: Select the Custom Celebrations feature from the CultureBot home tab, or go to the web app.

In Teams: Go to the Celebrations navigation item and choose the Custom tab.

Click View/Add Celebrations to open your celebrations list and add your first one.

Have dozens of celebrations to add at once? Email support@getculturebot.com with a spreadsheet and we'll import them for you.

Three Types of Celebrations

All celebrations live in the same place and use the same setup form. What makes them different is whether you're starting from a CultureBot template or building from scratch.

Awareness Days: Pre-built templates for diversity, inclusion, and wellness observances. Each comes with a suggested name, date, image, and message you can customize or edit before saving.

U.S. Holidays: Pre-built templates for major U.S. holidays. Floating holidays (like MLK Day, Thanksgiving, and Labor Day) are calculated dynamically for the current year so you don't have to update them. Each comes with a suggested name, date, image, and message you can customize or edit before saving.

Custom Celebrations: Fully manual. You fill in every field yourself: any name, any date, your own message, your own image. Great for company anniversaries, team milestones, or cultural observances not on the template list.

Setting Up a Celebration

The Add/Edit form walks you through each piece in order:

Suggested Templates (optional): A dropdown at the top split into "Awareness Days" and "Holidays." Selecting one auto-fills all the fields below. You can edit anything after selecting.

Month and Day (required): The day selector only becomes active after you've chosen a month. It adjusts automatically for the correct number of days in that month.

Name of Celebration (required): Free text. This becomes the label in your celebration list, and is visible as the title of the celebration in Slack/MS Teams.

Hour of Day (required): A time picker in 30-minute increments, displayed in your team's local timezone.

Image or GIF (optional): See the Graphics and GIFs section below.

Celebration Message (required): The body of the message that will post to your channel.

Sending Option (required): Controls recurrence. See Recurrence Options below.

Channel (required): A searchable dropdown of all your Slack or Teams channels. This is where the message will post.

Send Messages As (optional): Controls who the message appears to come from. See Sending As Someone Else below.

Notify everyone with @channel (optional): Adds an @channel tag so all channel members receive a notification when the message posts. On Microsoft Teams, using @channel requires a sender to be selected (the message can't post as CultureBot).

Recurrence Options

Each celebration has one of three sending options:

Send every year: Posts on the same date each year, indefinitely. Best for recurring holidays and awareness days.

Send this year: Posts once on the next occurrence of that date in the current calendar year, then stops. Good for a one-time event (such as an announcement, Open Enrollment, or one-time celebration) or a celebration you want to try before committing.

Send next year: Posts once on the next calendar year occurrence, then stops. Useful when you're planning ahead.

Sending As Someone Else

By default, celebration messages post as the CultureBot bot. The Send Messages As picker lets you change that. Options include:

• CultureBot (default): Posts as the CultureBot account

• Main Admin: Posts as the workspace's primary admin

• Any admin, partial admin, or team member: Search by name; each option shows the person's profile photo

When you select a person, the celebration message will appear in Slack or Teams as if that person posted it directly, with their name and avatar.

Graphics and GIFs

Clicking the image field opens a picker with three options:

GIF Library: A built-in Giphy/Tenor search. Find any GIF, click to select, and it's attached to your celebration.

Graphics Library: Images your organization has uploaded. To add images to your library, navigate to the Graphics Library page from the main navigation, then drag and drop or click to upload. Supported formats: JPG, PNG, GIF. Max file size: 10MB (non-GIF images are compressed to 3MB server-side). Each workspace can store up to 100 images. Once uploaded, images appear in this tab across all of CultureBot; you can also use them in water cooler questions, survey forms, shoutout backgrounds, and more.

Manual URL: Paste any publicly accessible image or GIF URL. A live preview appears so you can confirm it looks right before saving.

Managing Your Celebrations List

The Custom Celebrations page shows all your celebrations with a running count in the top right corner. You have a few tools to navigate them:

Search: Filters by celebration name in real time.

Filters: A filter panel (look for the Filters button) lets you narrow by Type (Holiday / Awareness Day / Custom), Month, Channel, or Sending Option. An active filter badge shows how many filters are on. Use "Clear All Filters" to reset.

Group By: Switch between a flat list or grouped by month, useful when you have celebrations spread across the year.

All Templated Dates in CultureBot

International Awareness Days 

U.S. Holidays