Celebrations reminder notifications proactively notify the right people — admins and managers — ahead of upcoming birthdays and work anniversaries. That gives your team time to plan something thoughtful before the big day arrives. Here's how to set them up.
How to Find Celebration Reminders
Open the Web App.
Go to Settings, then the Celebrations section.
Click Advanced Settings.
Scroll to the Celebration Reminders section.
Step 1: Choose Your Reminder Types
Under Reminder Types, select which celebrations should trigger a reminder:
Birthdays
Anniversaries
You can enable one or both. Reminders are sent at 9:00 am (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time on each scheduled day.
Step 2: Set Your Reminder Schedule
Under Reminder Schedule, choose how far ahead recipients are notified. Select any combination of:
Same day
1 day before
1 week before
2 weeks before
1 month before
Each option you select sends its own reminder, so recipients can get multiple touchpoints in the lead-up to a celebration — for example, a heads-up a month out to plan, and another the day before as a final nudge.
Step 3: Choose Your Reminder Recipients
Under Reminder Recipients, choose who gets notified — relative to the person celebrating:
All Admins — every admin in your workspace.
Their Group Manager(s) — the manager(s) of the celebrating member's group(s). You can add Group Managers in Groups.
Their Direct Manager(s) — the celebrating member's direct manager. You can add Direct Managers in individual Member Settings or Bulk Upload Member Properties (e.g., Direct Managers).
You can select any combination. Recipients are dynamic — Matter automatically routes each reminder to the correct managers based on who is celebrating, so you don't have to maintain the list manually.
Step 4: Customize the Reminder Intro Message
The Reminder Intro Message is the text that appears at the top of each reminder. The default is:
Hi {recipient}! Here's who's celebrating soon:
A few things to know:
Use the {recipient} token to tag the person receiving the reminder.
The list of upcoming celebrations is added automatically below your intro — you don't need to type names or dates.
Click Reset to default at any time to restore the original message.
Step 5: Preview and Save
Click See preview (top right of the Celebration Reminders section) to see exactly how your reminder will look before it goes out.
Click Save to apply your changes.
That's it! Your selected recipients will now get a heads-up ahead of every upcoming celebration. 🎉
Reminders Work Even When Celebrations Are Private
Reminder notifications are independent of celebration visibility. That means you can keep celebrations completely private and still get the advance heads-up. This is useful if your team prefers to write its own personalized messages, or if birthdays are confidential at your company.
Here's how the combinations work:
Celebration visibility | What the team sees | What recipients get |
Public | A celebration post in your channel | The reminder |
Private | Nothing public; the celebrating member gets a DM from Matter | The reminder |
Do Not Celebrate | Nothing at all | The reminder |
So with visibility set to Do Not Celebrate, nothing posts in the channel and the celebrating member isn't notified, but your selected admins and managers still receive the reminder with each person's name, date, and whether it's a birthday or work anniversary (including the year count).
A common setup: upload everyone's dates, set visibility to Do Not Celebrate or Private, and enable reminders for All Admins. Matter tracks every date so nothing slips, and your team handles the actual recognition however it prefers.
You can adjust visibility for everyone at once or per member. See adjusting celebration visibility for more details.