Service awards are the highlight of your company's employee recognition programs. Each employee's anniversary is an opportunity for you to celebrate their successes and encourage ongoing achievements. With MemoryBooks, teammates, friends, and managers can leave congratulatory notes, pictures, comments, and memories celebrating each employee’s workplace anniversaries.
To use MemoryBooks, ensure that service award automation is enabled on your platform. MemoryBooks may initially appear as “disabled” in settings, which indicates it’s not yet fully activated but can still be customized.
Note: You can begin customizing MemoryBooks while it is set to “disabled” in settings. You can enable and edit the MemoryBooks feature independently within advanced settings. However, for detailed configuration help, reach out to Technical Client Success Manager (TCSM) Team.
MemoryBooks
Overview
MemoryBooks is a digital experience showcasing the congratulatory comments managers, peers, and workplace friends submit for an employee's anniversary through the Teammate Participation feature. This feature provides an elegantly designed, modern experience by which your employees may review the well wishes and fond memories submitted by their coworkers. You can navigate as an admin to your settings through the Admin Queues tab.
User Experience
On the day of the anniversary, when the user celebrating their anniversary logs into their account, they will see a post in their feed congratulating them for their service and displaying the comments submitted by their peers. The user will be able to see its contents by clicking "View MemoryBook".
MemoryBooks will pull the teammate comments into a custom digital experience that celebrates' the awardee's anniversary. As part of MemoryBooks you are able to design standard pages included in each user's individual MemoryBook. These standard pages might include messaging from organizational leadership, company values, the history of your organization, etc. The screenshots displayed below show a sample title card, a sample CEO congratulatory message, and a sample comment from a teammate. Each of the pages shown below are customizable and can be tailored to match your organization's branding, draw attention to company values, and highlight your program goals. Users have the ability to export their MemoryBook as a PDF.
Design and Setup
Please enable service award automation before proceeding. To begin, log into your Awardco account and after navigating to the Admin section of the account, select "Settings,". Next, select "Advanced Settings" and toggle MemoryBooks on. Then click "MemoryBooks" on the left-hand side of the page.
The setup for MemoryBooks is broken into three steps. Step one is configuring the general settings such as branding, and which templates you'll use for displaying teammate comments. In step two we'll configure the books. In step three we'll modify the scheduling of notifications.
To begin with step one, click "Settings" to be brought to the configuration page. While the system will automatically bring in your general platform branding and build a custom background based on the colors defined in your branding tab, you have the ability to choose other branding colors, a logo that will be shown only in the MemoryBook, and upload a custom background image.
Next on this page is the Memory Templates section where you have the option to select, one by one, the template types that will be shown in the MemoryBook experience. These templates are used by the system to take the comments and images uploaded by the recipient's teammates and build them into the digital experience. Some template types are message only while others are image compatible. On this page you will also be able to upload custom background images for the templates. This will help you build a consistent theme across your MemoryBooks and will tailor the look and feel of the experience to your individual organization.
Click on the 'Media' tab to decide if you'd like users to be able to upload media, likes images and videos, to MemoryBook comments.
Now, you're ready to begin step two and customize the individual book experiences. Click the "Add Book" button. Enter a name for the MemoryBook Title, and, click "Save". Next, review the Settings Tab. The template name is what will display in the settings; this can be descriptive to help differentiate between different types of MemoryBooks. The display name is what will show throughout the platform for employees to see. This will show in the Upcoming Milestones Widget, on the comment page, and in the feed. Determine if this MemoryBook also comes with a monetary award. Pick the award amount, budget, and award network. All recipients who receive a MemoryBook with this template will receive the same award amount.
Toggle "Add Past Recognitions" on the User Comments page section to allow users submitting comments to a MemoryBook to include past recognitions.
The Notifications tab allows you to control when supervisors, peers, and direct reports are notified and which email template they will receive regarding MemoryBook contributions.
You have the following options for colleague notifications:
- Peers: Check this box to send invitation emails to employees who share the same supervisor as the award recipient.
- Direct Reports: Check this box to send invitation emails to employees who report directly to the award recipient.
You can select either, both, or neither of these options to customize who among the recipient's colleagues will be invited to contribute.
You can also configure a reminder notification to be sent to those who haven't yet submitted their comments. Additionally, you can enable an email notification to be sent to the award recipient to inform them about their MemoryBook.
Note: If colleague notifications (both Peers and Direct Reports) are disabled, One-off MemoryBooks will not automatically send any invitation emails for colleagues to comment. At least one of these options must be enabled if you want automatic colleague invitations for One-off MemoryBooks.
Finally, you can decide whether to allow those who have been invited to comment to further invite additional people to contribute to the MemoryBook.
Scheduling
Overview
This feature allows managers, peers, and workplace friends to submit comments for an employee's anniversary. In most service award programs, the certificate or letter sent to the awarded employee is generally the same for each employee across the company. When teammate participation is enabled, the system will leverage the organizational hierarchy loaded into your platform through your user file and will automatically invite members of the team to submit comments for the award recipient. While the MemoryBooks experience still allows for standardized messages from your organization's leadership, teammate participation provides a custom feel and individual polish on the award being given to your dedicated employee.
Employee Experience
When enabled, this feature will automatically invite the award recipient's team to submit comments and images for their anniversary. The system defines a team as the recipient's manager, employees who directly report to the same manager as the recipient, employees who report directly to the award recipient, and anyone who has the recipient in their My Circle or is part of the recipient’s My Circle. Several days before the recipient's workplace anniversary date, these users will receive an email inviting them to submit a comment for that employee's award. You can determine how early this email is sent in platform settings.
After clicking the "Recognize" button in the email, the user will be brought to your platform's login page. Once they have logged in, they will see a form with three steps.
- The first step asks the user to submit a comment in the text box. The comment is limited to 600 characters and is a required field.
- The second step is the optional memory image upload. If the user opts to include a memory image, the system will check the image being loaded for adherence to size requirements (800px by 800px). After selecting a photo to load, the system will prompt the user to crop the image to a square format in the interface.
- Once the form has been filled out, the user will click "Submit." The system will schedule the comment and any images provided to be published to the recipient's feed on the day of their anniversary.
Once the user submits their comment, they will be brought to a confirmation page. On this page, they will be able to preview the comment, return to the form to make edits, and invite others to participate in the anniversary. This "Invite Others" function can be disabled in settings but we recommend enabling it so that workplace friends who may not be on the recipient's team can comment and participate in the anniversary celebration. From this page the teammate submitting the comment will be able to navigate back away from the submission confirmation page by clicking "Back to Feed," or by using the tabs at the top of the page.
Memory Books and Slack
We built this feature to give more visibility into the celebration of your team members. If your Service Awards are public and your Slack integration is complete, Memory Books will automatically appear in the designated channel. If your Service Awards are not set to public, they will NOT appear in the Slack channel.
While this article covers a lot of material, the configuration of notifications and MemoryBooks is quite simple and is made all the more so by the inclusion of your Awardco team in the project. Reach out to the team to get started today.
One-Off MemoryBooks
Super Admins and those with the One-time MemoryBooks Creation permission can create one-off MemoryBooks. The button to start the process is located on the MemoryBook queue page.
Select the recipient of the MemoryBook, the template, when the book should be given to the recipient, and the visibility. If the teammate invite lead time has already passed, the invite emails will go out at the top of the hour.
After clicking Next, a summary will show you the details surrounding the MemoryBook.
Once the MemoryBook has been created, the creator can copy and share the link to comment or comment themselves. Note: If MemoryBook notifications are disabled, One-off MemoryBooks will not automatically invite team members to comment. These notifications will need to be enabled in the Notifications tab in a MemoryBook's settings if you'd like automatic teammate invitations to be sent for One-off MemoryBooks.
The one-off MemoryBook will now act like any other MemoryBook. It will show in the queues and in the Upcoming Milestones widget.
Additional Attachments
MemoryBooks are as Easy as 1-2-3
MemoryBook Walkthrough
MemoryBook Key Features
If you have any questions, please contact Awardco Admin Support.