Journey Use Case: Employee Birthday

This article only applies to your community if your Firstup contract includes this functionality. Please contact your Customer Success Manager with any questions about feature availability for your community.

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Before You Start
Start the Journey
Create the Communication
Publish the Journey
Additional Resources

In this example, you’ll create a journey that targets a specific member on a specific day - their birthday!

You'll create an automated journey that only targets members on their birthday by using audience attributes, date operators, and Personalized Attributes.

Before You Start

For this example, we want to celebrate our members' birthdays, so you'll need a birthday campaign. You can create the campaign while creating your journey, or have one ready to select. For our example, we're selecting a pre-made campaign template.

In addition, you'll need to ensure your members have the custom attribute birthday in their user profile.

Creating the automated journey can be split into three parts:

Starting the journey
Creating the communication
Publishing the journey

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Start the Journey

Start the journey by selecting the template type, its schedule, and who receives its communication.

In Creator Studio, go to the Journeys tab, then select Create Journey in the top right corner.
Select the Birthday template.
This opens the journey workflow page. You can rename your journey if necessary by selecting Birthday at the top of the workflow page or begin creating your workflow.
Select the Start Journey step.
Configure your audience and settings. For this example:
- Start type set to Daily.
- Journey Start Date set to today's date.
- Daily Run Time is set at 09:00 in Europe/London.
- Trigger is set to Audience > All Users.
- Filter Members is set to Date of Birth > In Time Frame > Today.

Screenshot 2025-07-23 at 13.52.15.png

Start Type

Setting the Start Type to Daily means every day this journey will run. This does mean that if your member's birthday falls on a day they do not typically work, for example on a weekend or a public holiday, the communication is still published to their feed.

If you want to avoid sending members a birthday communication when they are not scheduled to work, you could create an audience for specific shifts. Refer to our audience article for more information.

Daily Run Time

You can only set the Daily Run Time to one instance. Therefore, if you have members across multiple time zones, it may be a good idea to create a Birthday journey for each time zone to save communications from being sent out at antisocial hours.

Trigger

Here is where you can control your audience and who receives your daily communication schedule. You can select all users, or a defined audience to, for example, avoid sending to members on non-work days. Or, you may want to split your employees by department if specific job titles or departments are entitled to different benefits. Alternatively, create an aggregated filtered members list (see below).

Filter Members

To ensure this communication is only sent to members on their birthday, you must set Filter Members to Date of Birth > In Time Frame > Today. This filters out all users whose birthday is not on the day and time of when the scheduled communication goes out.

Filter your members further. Examples:

Only target a specific department or shift type.
Filter by timezone so that your Daily Run time does not send to members during their antisocial hours if they are in a different timezone.
Filter further by reach, if you only want this communication sent by a particular channel, like email only.

Note: In this instance, when applying multiple filters, ensure you have the AND toggle switched on.

Create the Communication

Once you have configured your journey start, you're ready to add your communication to the journey. In our example, we're adding a happy birthday campaign.

Select the Communication step.
Here, you have a choice:
- Create a new campaign.
- Select an existing campaign.
- Select an existing template. For our example, we've got a predefined Happy Birthday template.
  
  This template includes a birthday message, and a personalized attribute variable to put the member's first name in the campaign automatically.
Now that your campaign has been added, you need to configure the communication delivery. Here, you have a choice:
- Send by email - edit the email alias, subject line, preview text, and add personalized attributes.
- Send via the Notification Center - edit the displayed message, mark as important, and add personalized attributes.
- Send via push notification to their mobile (additional option when sending via notification center) - edit the displayed message, and add personalized attributes.
  
  Note: When sending to multiple channels, under Channel Delivery, selecting Optimize which channels to leverage allows the system to determine the best channel to reach audience members based on their user behavior. You also have the option to send a communication to each selected channel.

Publish the Journey

The final step is to publish your journey to your member experience!

Before publishing, preview your communication. Select the Preview tab.
Select who to preview as. Selecting yourself tests any personalized attribute variables.
Select which channel to preview as.
You can send an actual test campaign to yourself or a selected audience member by selecting Send a Test Communication.
Select the channels you want to send your test to.
- Note: Your test campaigns will include a [Test] prefix.
Before publishing your communication, you'll need to select the Content Approval checkbox, and the Content Settings Require Acknowledgement checkbox in the Configure tab.
When you're ready to publish, simply select the Publish button to start your journey.