Add Personalization Using Variables

Contents

• How to use variables in Dado
• Examples of how variables are shown to employees
  • What does it mean when {{ curly brackets }} show up in a task/message?
• Setting fallback values for variables
• Adding your own custom variables
• Advanced customization for dates

How to use variables to personalize content in Dado

Variables enable you to insert information personalized to each employee into a Message, Task or Automation. When the Task is sent to recipients, the variable will be replaced with the corresponding text. 

For instance, you can use variables to:

• greet an employee by name
• tell a new hire the name of their buddy
• confirm a new hire's start date to their manager

Examples of how variables are shown to employees

What does it mean when {{ curly brackets }} show up in a task/message?

When Dado tries to insert a variable, but there's no data to insert, it will default to showing the variable name. This will be surrounded by curly brackets, and include the variable name.

This can happen if:

• data from a Sub-task or import source has not yet been written into this field
  • if you're expecting a Sub-task to fill in this data, check to make sure that Task is sent out well in advance of the Task/Message where you want to use the data
  • if you're expecting an import source to fill in this data, make sure you've set up the correct field mappings to pull this data into the right field; and check in your import source to see if the data is missing for some individuals
• the wrong variable has been inserted
  • Go to the Employee List and toggle the columns to show this data field. Make sure you have data in this field for the people you should. If you don't, check to see if there is another similarly named field you could be confusing this with.
  • If a Sub-task should be writing data to this field, go to check the Data Destination settings for that Sub-task. Maybe a different field has been specified?
  • If an import source should be writing data to this field, check the field mappings for that import source. Maybe a different field has been specified?

To further protect against edge-cases where there is no data for a variable to insert, you can use fallback values when you set up your variables (see below).

Setting fallback values for variables

When you use a variable in a timeline item, but that data is missing for a particular employee, Dado defaults to showing the variable label:

Usually this isn't a problem, as you will be importing all the key datapoints (eg name, first day at work) into Dado. However, there will be some occasions when you insert a variable and know that sometimes the data will be missing for some employees. In this situation, you can set a fallback value using the following syntax:

Within the curly braces, add two pipe characters ( || ) and then type your fallback value, enclosed by double-quotes.

Fallbacks can be set anywhere you use variables.

Adding your own custom variables

Any Custom Fields you add to Dado user profiles can be used as variables. So, if you added a Custom Field called "favorite color", you could insert it into a Task/Message/Automation using the Variable {{ participant.favoriteColor }}

For more information see the article Add Custom Fields with Extra User Data

Advanced customization for dates

Variables that contain dates such as {{ participant.startDate }} can be further customized to display only parts of the date or specific formats.

To use this advanced feature, add a pipe symbol (|) after the date variable followed by a date token, such as this: 

{{ participant.startDate | dd.mm.YYYY }}

Examples

List of date tokens

• YYYY : 4-digit year, e.g. '2021'
• YY : 2-digit year, e.g. '21'
• MMMM : Full-length month, e.g. 'June'
• MMM : 3-character month, e.g. 'Jun'
• MM : Month of the year, zero-padded e.g. '06'
• M : Month of the year, e.g. '6'
• DD : Day of the month, with zero e.g. '01'
• D : Day of the month e.g. '1'
• dddd : Day of the week, e.g. 'Sunday
• ddd : 3-character day of the week, e.g. 'Sun'
• ww : week of the year, e.g. '52'
• Q : number of calendar quarter, e.g. '2'
• :: mondayOfWeek : add this at the end of the date tokens to specify the date of the Monday that starts that week, instead of the date itself (see the example above)