How to set up an anniversary experience

Anniversary data fields
Setting up an anniversary experience
Suggestions for a great anniversary experience

Celebrating an employee’s work anniversary is a great way to show employees that they are a valued member of your organization. With a Dado anniversary experience, letting employees know that they are appreciated is easier than ever.

Anniversary data fields

Dado enables you to automate anniversary celebrations via 2 special fields which are automatically generated from the employee data you import into Dado:

Anniversary Date: the exact date of the employee’s next anniversary

Anniversary Count: the number of years the employee will have been with your organization, at their next anniversary.
1. For instance, if the employee joined your company 23 months ago, this field will be 2, because their next anniversary is their 2nd anniversary.
2. You can add formatting to this field if you’d like to display the value as “5th” instead of “5”

You can use these fields in the same way as any other Dado field:

Variables in your messages, tasks and automations
- Eg you can send a message with the subject line “Happy 5th anniversary!”
In the rules defining a target audience
- Eg you can have a task for managers to buy a gift for employees’ fifth, tenth and fifteenth anniversaries
In the criteria for who gets enrolled in an experience
When determining the start date of an experience

Setting up an anniversary experience

To make your anniversary experience, you’ll need to specify a start-date relative to the new Anniversary date field:

Go to the ‘Launch date’ section in the edit mode of your Experience, and select
Then in the dropdown, choose “participant’s Anniversary”

Remember that you can also add some criteria that filter which employees will be automatically enrolled in this experience, in the “Participants” section. For instance, perhaps your policy is not to celebrate anniversaries for contractors, only FTEs.

There are extra things to note about how anniversary experiences operate.

Anniversary experiences automatically enroll participants 2 weeks before the start

Let’s say you’ve made an anniversary experience that kicks off with a message to the employee’s manager, 3 weeks before their next anniversary.

The experience for that employee will be automatically created 2 weeks before that – so, 5 weeks in total before the anniversary date. This is designed to give you time to double-check that this person should be enrolled, and make any changes (e.g. switching the manager, skipping some items) before anything gets sent.

Anniversary experiences automatically repeat

Employees will be enrolled in the anniversary experience every year (as long as they still meet the Participant criteria for the experience). You don’t need to do anything to make this happen; it will happen automatically.

If you only want participants to go through this experience on particular anniversaries, we suggest you use Participant criteria to specify this

The anniversary fields are ‘fixed’ during the experience

The Anniversary Count and Anniversary Date fields automatically update themselves as time passes. For instance:

1 week before an employee’s first anniversary, the Anniversary Count field will have the value 1, and the Anniversary Date field will be exactly 1 year after their first day at work
1 week after the employee’s first anniversary, the Anniversary Count field will have the value 2, and the Anniversary Date field will be exactly 2 years after their first day at work

However, once an anniversary experience has started, we keep the values of these 2 fields fixed within this experience. This is to prevent any confusion during the experience. Here’s an example of how this works:

One week before the employee’s 5th anniversary, their manager receives a task telling them “Your direct report’s 5th anniversary is on 12th August 2023; please arrange a party for this special occasion”
On the date of the anniversary, the employee receives a message saying “Happy 5th anniversary!”
One week after the anniversary, the employee receives a message saying “We hope you enjoyed your 5th anniversary party”

Even though the data fields would have to be updated for this employee, to correspond to their sixth anniversary, we keep the values “fixed” at 5 for the duration of that 5th anniversary experience.

This means you can be confident in setting up tasks, messages and automations after the anniversary date, as part of your anniversary experience.

Suggestions for a great anniversary experience

Assign the employee’s manager a task two weeks ahead of the anniversary, asking them to prepare a card or small celebration. Set a reminder 1 week before the anniversary
Send a “happy anniversary” message to the employee themselves on the date itself
For special milestones, make a budget available for the manager to buy a small gift. Alternatively, give the employee a task to choose between a range of possible gifts, such as gift cards or swag
For co-located teams, automate the creation of a calendar event for a celebration lunch for the employee and their team
For remote teams, send a coupon or credit to the employee for a lunch delivery on the date of the anniversary