PraisePal's Slack integration allows you to sync the members from your Slack Workspace to PraisePal Workspace's Users and to configure a Slack channel where recognition notifications are posted to.

Who can use this feature

👑 Available to Workspaces on the Starter Plan and above.

⚙️ Global Admin Permissions are required

The Help Center article for syncing your Slack Workspace's Users can be found here.

Configuring a Slack channel to receive notifications will allow recognitions that are posted by Users to be broadcasted to the Slack channel, bringing the recognition feed from the Web App to your Slack Workspace.

Setting up your Slack Integration

The integration with Slack can be enabled within the Admin Settings menu, under the Integrations tab.

Important:

We recommend that a Slack Admin sets up the integration with Slack. This is as certain Slack Workspaces may have specific settings that restrict the installation of external applications to only Slack Admins.

To begin, click on the Get Started button. This will lead you to an external Slack-hosted webpage, where you'll be prompted to authorise PraisePal to be installed into your Slack Workspace.

Once you authorise the installation of PraisePal, you'll be redirected back to the Integrations page of your PraisePal Workspace.

Select a Slack Channel

Under the Configure Broadcast Channel section, within the Select Channel tab, a dropdown of public Slack channels that are available to you will be listed.

Selecting one of these channels will set that channel as the Broadcast Channel to which all PraisePal recognitions will be posted whenever your Users give a recognition.

Create a Slack Channel

Clicking on the Create Channel tab will allow you to create a new channel instead.

If you were not the Admin that initially set up the Slack Integration with PraisePal, you'll be asked to connect your Slack account before you can create a channel.

In such a case, you'll see a button like the above. Simply click on the Connect to Slack button and follow the steps to connect your Slack account.

Common Errors:

Insufficient Permissions
Duplicate Channel Names
Channel Name Rules

1. Insufficient Permissions:

The error message that is displayed when this error is encountered is:

It seems like you don't have sufficient permissions in your Slack Workspace to create a channel.

Some Slack Workspaces have configured settings that only allow Slack Admins or Workspace Owners to create and manage channels.

You should check if your Slack Workspace has configured such a setting. This can be found under your Slack's Workspace settings > Permissions tab > Channel Management.

More information can be found on Slack's Help Center Article on Channel Management.

2. Duplicate Channel Names:

The error message that is displayed when this error is encountered is:

There seems to be a channel with that name already.

This error occurs when there is already another channel with the name that you're trying to create. This channel might have been set to Private, or is a channel that is inaccessible to you. Slack does not allow the same channel names, even if one of the channels might be private.

The best way forward would be to simply choose another channel name to proceed with. Note that the channels displayed in the Select Channel dropdown only displays public channels and does not consist of all the channels in your Slack Workspace.

3. Channel Name Rules

There are a few different error messages that can occur with regards to Slack's channel name rules:

1. Slack channel names can’t contain spaces, full stops or most punctuation. 
2. Channel names cannot be an app's name (eg. PraisePal) or the name of a User (eg. John)
3. Channel names have a maximum limit of 80 characters.

In general, Slack has the following rules when selecting a name for channels:

Only lowercase letters and numbers
Only hyphens and underscores, all other special characters are not allowed
Spaces are not allowed
Channel name cannot be the same as a Workspace Member or Bot, which means channel names cannot be "praisepal"
A maxmimum character limit of 80 characters

These rules must be followed, otherwise creating a channel will fail.