Webinar | Celebrate More, Work Less: Using Automation to Build Culture

What do you have in common with dolphins, elephants, wolves, and bonobo monkys?

Believe it or not, all of us, even across species, are wired for celebration. From wild herds to workplace teams, celebration is more than just a nice-to-have. It’s how we bond, build trust, and create belonging.

But here’s the catch: in the modern workplace, the will to celebrate is there—but the time often isn’t.

That’s why we hosted a live webinar yesterday to dive into a better way forward: Automated Gifting.

In Celebrate More, Work Less: Using Automation to Build Culture, we explored:

• Why celebration is essential to a thriving team culture
• How automation can enhance connection—not replace it
• A live walkthrough of Loop & Tie’s new Automated Gifting feature
• Real-world use cases and success stories from HR leaders
• Tips for getting started, whether you're a team of 10 or 10,000

Missed the session? No problem. You can watch the full recording below and explore the full transcript at your own pace. 👇

Transcript:

Hey, hey, friends. It's so awesome to get to see everybody today. Thank you so much for joining today's webinar about how to help you celebrate more and work less by using automations through Loop and Tie. I'm MK Getler, the chief marketing officer here at Loop and Tie, and I'm super thrilled to talk to you about what we're gonna get up to today. So without further ado, let's dive right in.

We're gonna talk a little bit today about how to build a culture of celebration.

We're, of course, gonna outline the moments and the occasions worth celebrating and, of course, most importantly, dive into automations and how to use those to help you build and scale connections with your members of your team.

The Importance of Connection

To get started, though, I thought we might have a little bit of fun.

First things first, what do we, as humans, dolphins, elephants, wolves, and bonobo monkeys all have in common.

If you've guessed that we all, as a culture, celebrate, you guessed wisely.

Dolphins, after they go hunting celebration with their tribes. Wolves, similarly, the dolphins with their hunts and with the return of pack members all celebrate, and bonobo monkeys as well too celebrate milestones within their relationships. So all this to say, celebration is an important social milestone for us to be involved in. And that doesn't necessarily mean social in the the personal context.

It means it in the professional context as well too. We like to think of connection kind of as the core of social celebration to be the core of social connection. And your workplace is no different than a pod of dolphins or a pack of wolves. It's essential to help your employees feel more connected, not just to themselves or to each other, but to the work that they're doing and how they're there to make an impact for your organization.

So when folks feel connected to your organization, there is a very tangible measurement of that impact. We've seen many, many studies as time has gone on that connection to an organization directly impacts things like profitability, engagement, retention rates of your employees.

And, of course, more importantly, we're trying to help to the the turnover for many organizations.

So when you've built a con a company with a culture of celebration, you've helped your employees feel valued. And when they feel more valued, they're going to be more likely to be engaged and continue to grow and scale their professional careers and in turn, your organization.

Leveraging Automations for Celebration

So automations is a strategic advantage for organizations who are looking to use to build celebration as part of the culture, but maybe delegate some of the friction points in the process of sending gifts for moments of celebration.

So we see automations as your strategic advantage to be able to create consistent experiences, but still use them with intentionality.

Or was I like to put it, my life philosophy is to work smarter, not harder.

Exploring Loop and Tie's Automation Features‍

So with automations helping to simplify and streamline your workflow, I thought it might be fun for us to spend some time looking more closely at Loop and Tie's brand new automation feature.

I'm going to swap over to the live instance of Loop and Tie and give you a quick tour of the ins and outs of automations.
‍

You might notice that automations now lives here on the tab on your main dashboard. You'll find that just below dashboard and just above reports.

When you click on automations, you'll be taken to a menu or a table of the existing automations that you have. Or if you don't have any automations, you'll see a new call to action to help you prompt building in automations.

Now as tempting as it might be to immediately jump in and build some automations, there's a few things I'd like to give you a quick tour on to make sure that your automations are set up with ease and as simply as possible.

The first thing we're going to look at is the contact records in looping time. So if we go back over to our main nav and we scroll down this nav until we find contacts, you'll now find that your entire gift database has been turned into a contact database. You'll see contacts in here. I'll even search for myself.

Here we go. You'll see your contacts in here with details like their contact information, email address, their job title, the company for which they work, their phone number, and more most important for these celebrations that we're gonna help you scale and work smarter and harder on, these meaningful dates.

We love to celebrate birthdays around here at Loop and Tie and highly encourage you to celebrate birthdays around your organization, and you should always be celebrating the moment in time in which somebody joined your workforce. So work anniversaries are super important as well.

Your contacts can be added to your dashboard in one of two way in three ways actually, one of three ways. The first of which is for you to manually add a contact by clicking this call to action button and entering in all of the details of the contacts that you'd like to add. Again, don't forget to add their meaningful dates like their birthday or work anniversaries.

Otherwise, it's gonna be challenging for you to build the automation that you need to in order to scale the celebration within your company.

That's way number one to upload your contacts. Now option number two is to actually import a list of contacts. So if you want to add all of your employees all at once from your organization, you can download our spreadsheet template from here and then upload your contacts. The reason I like this process and this route is that you can add folks to a contact list. Think of a contact list as a means for organizing your contacts in a meaningful way to help you scale not just the automation of sending gifts, but the organization and the streamlining of all of your gifting processes.

Remember that when you do add these lists, we're gonna be adding in details like email address because that's how the gifts get sent to somebody. But you'll also be adding those key dates, so birthdays, work anniversaries. Don't forget them. They're super important.

And in the spirit of working smarter, not harder, the third and final way that you can add in your contacts is by adding an HRIS integration.

So HRIS stands for a human resources information system.

We already have our Justworks instance set up and configured here, but you can add platforms like Workday or like Okta to Loop and Tie for configuration.

Once you add in your integration, you're then prompted to authorize said integration and then map the fields one to one for your first name to first name, last name to last name, email address. And, again, I sound like a broken record. Don't forget to map your your meaningful dates so that we can help build your automations.

So that's way number three. But just a quick recap, the ways in which you can add your contacts. Number one is to create a new contact one by one manually.

Number two is to import a list of contacts. And number three is to connect your HRIS systems to automatically import all of your contact data for your employees.

Once you have your team imported in, no matter which means by which you imported them, the next thing you're going to wanna do is manage contacts lists. Your contact slips, just like like I mentioned earlier, is a way for which you to organize can organize your contacts.

So you might think of your US employees as a list. You might also think of your holiday lists as well too. Lists are just a system by which you are going to organize your contacts so you can build meaningful automations for them. You can always edit your contact lists. You can change the color of that list or the naming convention of those lists. Or when you go to create a brand new list, you'll be able to just click create a list, name said list, and then color choose that color coding system

You'll also be able to add somebody to a list as well too. So you can do this one by one in that manual import way that we talked about just a second ago. You'll see I've already added myself to two lists here. You can add somebody to a list when you upload them, or you can add them to a list at the point in time in which you build your integrations.

Managing contact lists is super important. That way, you are able to scale all of your gifting initiatives.

Creating Gift Templates‍

With that said, we have the two most important things to get started. We have our contacts and we have our lists. And we need one more key ingredient in order to get started with our automations, and those are our gift templates. So when you click on on your main dashboard, the word templates, and jump down to gift templates, you'll be able to create a new gift template. Now for those of you that are veterans in the Loop and Tie dashboard, you might actually see that these are pretty straight forward. So let's go ahead and add our twenty twenty five employee birthday gift template, and we'll click create template.

For the seasoned veterans, this will look just like you dropped into the middle of the send a gift flow, and that's essentially what we've built here. From here, you'll choose the collection that you'd like to use. You can either choose our standard marketplace selection collections here, or you can choose your custom collections that you've built on your back end. For the purposes of this, we'll go ahead and actually, we're gonna build a collection for our folks that are, maybe let's see. Interested in supporting women owned businesses. So we'll go ahead and select this collection.

And from here, we're able to customize just like we normally do all of our, details of the email sent. So we can add and remove our header, we can add in all of our cute little images here, and, of course, type our message.

So we're gonna say dear, and we're gonna add in the personalization token first name. And then we're gonna add in a quick message to say happy birthday. "We're thrilled to celebrate you today."

And then signed the team. So we've added our gift email. We've standardized our message for everybody. We also, of course, as you normally do in the send a gift flow, have the ability to change the button color. So if we wanna make it a nice blue, we can go ahead and change that here.

And then we'll keep moving to the next step, which is to just put the fine tuning and finessing. I like to drag and drop the image just a little bit higher here. That's a personal preference of mine. So it's a little bit more centered on that, landing pageWe'll move this back down. We look great. Next thing we're gonna do is if we wanted to, we could enhance this order by adding things like sending it to our campaign to see the overall performance of this. We could add in a survey or even schedule a meeting if we wanted to with our teammates

I've seen folks build this where they've scheduled a one year anniversary conversation with their team to just say, hey. Let's just do a quick check-in, see how things are going.

Once you've enhanced your order, you're then able to take one final look at your email before it goes out. This looks pretty good, and then we'll just click save template. And that template now exists. Again, in the spirit of working smarter, not harder, templates help you save time by just standardizing the gift experience.

Templates can be used for a multitude of things, but they're very advantageous when building out your automations.‍

Setting Up Your First Automation‍

Now that we've built the second most important ingredient for building our automations, let's head on over to the automations and build our very first automations together. So we'll head over here to our main nav, click automations, and then we'll click new gift automation.

From here, the setup process is very straightforward because we've already done all of our work.

The first thing we wanna do is send set the occasion for which we are sending these gifts. In this case, we will choose them for birthday, but you can choose work anniversary. And in fact, in the spirit of working smarter, not harder, you can configure your gift anniversaries for all the way up to forty years worth of service. If you have a teammate who has bit put in forty years worth of service, please give them a massive high five for me and for thanks for being a rock star at your organization.

Once you've set up these work anniversaries, you're actually able to add in more than one gift template for each year. So for example, if in year one, you send a one hundred dollar collection and in year two, you wanna send a two hundred dollar collection, three, four, five, and so on, you can configure all of these gift templates in here and set this all up at once so you don't have to go in every single year and remember to send your one or two or three or forty year anniversaries.

Let's go back to configuring a birthday. Just keep it pretty straightforward.

We have our birthday template here. We have our lists, which is why it was so important for us to set up our lists. If you didn't wanna send this to all of your contacts, but maybe to a select list of your US based employees, you can configure that here in your your, gifts.

You then also have the ability to set up the US versus domestic or international gifts. Because this is for our US based employees, we'll keep it here to US and domestic.

And last but certainly not least, we're gonna go in and add the gift template that we already built. Here it is with our cute little cartoon pets.

And our configuration is almost complete of the automations. That's how easy this process was. We're gonna make sure that we have a to name the automation. So we're gonna do this will be our twenty twenty five birthday gift automation, and we'll click save. And this is the naming convention that it will be found on that table when we log back into our dashboards.

We also can choose to delay the the start of this if we wanted to by starting it as inactive and then turn it on in a specific point in time, or just make it active and that will automatically sequence everybody who's all automatically assigned in your workflow.

You also have the option to set a date range for this to run. So, for example, if you wanted to set a specific automation to send birthday gifts to folks only in the summertime, you can set that date range to say, I only wanna send gifts for folks whose birthdays are June first until August thirty first. Here we go. That would then only send this automation during these selected time frames.

You also have the option to choose an email notifications that get sent out. So if you don't wanna get received now these email notifications, I should clarify, are email notifications to you about when these gifts are going to be sent.

So about two weeks before your, next month worth of birthdays, you are gonna be receiving an email that lets you know what birthdays lie ahead.

I would highly I would strongly, strongly recommend sending this out, this up to monthly for you so you do receive those notifications.

But you do have the option to just put it on autopilot and say, don't send me any notifications about the gift emails that are forthcoming.

I am gonna choose this monthly, though, because I like to get a heads up. So that way, I can understand what how much to budget and what our gift spend is gonna look like for the next month.

Now I also have the ability to schedule the time of the send of these emails as well too. So for example, if my US based team, I want those to go out at nine AM, I have the ability to configure what time frame I want these to go out. Or maybe I actually wanna send these out at, twelve PM during the workday so that I can go ahead and give them, a gift. Everybody in the office can celebrate this person.

And, of course, you can choose the time zone in which you wanted this to be sent out. So if you have a team on Pacific time, you want them to go out at eleven PM Pacific time, or if you want to actually change this to twelve AM Pacific time, you have the ability to do any sort of configuration for time zones.

And last but not least, you need to designate a pay form of payment for your automations.

If you like to prepurchase your credit cards or your your points rather, you can prepurchase your LupinTay credits directly from your portal and then, on occasion, be able to top up the balance that you have, and it will draw down from that balance.

Or if you prefer to pay as you go, you can include your credit card payment information in here, and it will automatically default to the payment card that is on file.

We'll choose Loop and Tie Credits here because we like to prepurchase our credits, and that's it. We've built our first automation All the way from defining the occasion straight through to defining the payment terms, we are ready to rock. So once I click automation, it's building this handy dandy automation for us, and boom, we're able to send this out to all of the members of the team here at Lupin Time. So it was pretty straightforward for us to be able to build our very first automation.

You also have the ability to turn your your, status of your birthday or emails rather off. You have the ability to see what gift is next upcoming. You have the ability to filter by the type of gifts that being sent out or the status that you're seeing as well too. And, of course, you can always search your automations by name.

If you ever want to clone or duplicate a automation, you can click this little dot menu here and click duplicate. Or if you wanna edit and modify anything, you can go back in here and it will take you into that automation.‍

Deleting Automations

Or you can also go ahead and just completely delete and remove this automation as well too.

So that's it. It is very straightforward for you to be able to build your automation. Step one, make sure you've imported your contacts.

Step two, make sure you've built your gift templates. And then step three, configure your automations for the moments and occasions that are worth celebrating for you and your team.

With that said, I'm so excited to be able to go through all of the details of our walk through today. But more importantly, I wanna underscore and reemphasize that while automations are helping you work smarter, not harder, it never replaces the human touch. All it's doing is protecting it to ensure that you have the quality of connection with the employees at your organization that you deserve and that they deserve as well too. If you have any questions about setting up automations, I'd be happy to take a few of them now. Or if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to a member of the team here at Loop and Tie. We can go ahead and drop the demo link for you as a follow-up to today's conversation. Or if you're already, like I said, a seasoned veteran, you're able to reach out to the members of your team, here at Loop and Tie to be able to help you get set up with your first automations.