MemoryBooks: Digital Service Awards

Service awards are the crown jewel of your company's employee appreciation program. Each employee's anniversary is an opportunity for you to celebrate their past successes and revitalize their drive to find continued success in the future. With MemoryBooks you can invite teammates, friends, and managers to leave congratulatory notes, pictures, comments, and memories celebrating workplace anniversaries for every employee. 

Please note, in order to use MemoryBooks, service award automation must be enabled on your platform. Due to the extensive custom configuration required to enable the MemoryBook feature, only Awardco Client Success Managers are able to enable the MemoryBook feature. To start building out your organization's MemoryBooks, please speak with your Client Success Manager. Reference the video below for a comprehensive walkthrough of MemoryBook setup.

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 click through the submitted comments in the feed. 

When MemoryBooks is enabled, the recipient's individual MemoryBook will be accessible by clicking the "VIEW MEMORYBOOK" button at the bottom of their post. 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

Because enabling automated service awards is required for MemoryBooks, we recommend working with your Awardco point of contact when designing and building your organization's MemoryBooks. 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," and click "MemoryBook."  

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 "Themes" 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. 

After you've gone through the full Theme Settings page, you're ready to begin step two and customize the individual book experiences. Click "Books" tab and select the "Add Book" button. Enter a name for the Template Title, and, next, specify the anniversary years you'd like the MemoryBook to be released to in the Attached Events section. Select "Add Events" and then select the years that you'd like to receive that MemoryBook.

                       

If multiple events are attached to a book, each event will receive the same book. For example the 5, 10, 15, and 20-year anniversaries will all receive the same book. You cannot attach one event/year to more than one book. If an event/year is not assigned to a book, the employee will not receive a MemoryBook. 

In the Pages section, you are able to add and edit introductory pages that will post at the beginning of each MemoryBook experience. To add a page, click "Add Page" at the bottom of the page section. These pages are posted in order—meaning if you create three pages, the top will be the first displayed in the digital experience.

We highly recommend discussing your vision for these pages with your administration team and your communications or design teams (if available) before working with your Awardco point of contact to have them built. Finally, once you've begun building your pages, you will be able to click the "Preview" button at the top of the page to see how the introductory pages will appear for the award recipient. 

After you've configured your books and are comfortable with your theme settings, be sure to build out your Scheduling settings (see below). Once you have completed these two steps don't forget to enable your MemoryBooks by flipping the switch to "Active". 

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, and employees who report directly to the award recipient. 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 choose to upload a new profile picture or to use their current picture. If there is no picture loaded and they choose to submit the comment with no photo, no avatar or profile picture will be shown in the MemoryBook digital experience.
• 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.
• Third and finally the user will submit a comment in the text box. The comment is limited to 600 characters and is a required field. 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. 

 

Setting Configuration

To navigate to your MemoryBook settings page, login to your Awardco platform, click the "Admin" button in the top right corner of the screen, navigate to the settings tab, and select the "MemoryBook" option from the sidebar.

Please note, it is possible to turn the scheduling feature on while leaving MemoryBooks off. When configured in this manner, teammates will receive an email inviting comments for the recipient's anniversary and those comments will be posted in the company feed on the day of the anniversary but the digital experience provided by MemoryBooks will not be made available. 

Glossary of MemoryBook Terms

• Initial Notification - The settings for the initial notification inviting managers and teammates to participate in the MemoryBook. 
  • Lead Time - The number of days before the anniversary date when the notification will be sent. 
  • Email Template - Select which email template you would like the system to use when inviting teammates to comment on the recipient's anniversary. 
  • Supervisor Template - Select the email template to be sent to the award recipient's direct supervisor when inviting that manager to participate in the anniversary recognition. This is a great opportunity to provide specific direction for managers. 
• Reminder Notification - 
  • Send Reminder? - This toggle option allows you to enable or disable the reminder email feature. When enabled, the system will automatically send the email you specify in the "Email Template" field to users who have not submitted comments to the MemoryBook before the number of days specified in "Lead Time" is reached. 
  • Lead Time - The number of days before the anniversary date when the reminder email will be sent to users who have not yet participated.
  • Email Template - The email template to be used for the reminder email. Work with your Awardco point of contact to build an email template for this feature. 
• Invite Others - This is the feature shown in the screenshots above. Users who submit a comment will be given the ability to invite other platform users to submit a comment as well. Users can only be invited once. If someone loses or deletes their email containing the link to the comment form, the recipient's manager will need to resend the invitation from their Admin Queues tab. You may also reference this article to view instructions for resending the teammate invite and for assessing the participation rate for invited employees. 
• Show MemoryBook Events on the Feed? - Toggling "Show" will display MemoryBooks on the feed and display upcoming milestones. This gives users a proactive way to comment on upcoming MemoryBooks and increases engagement.

• MemoryBook Events Metadata Filter -The metadata filter will only show the upcoming milestones for users that have matching metadata. For example if you pick Department, Sales would only see upcoming milestones for those in Sales.
  This is similar to how the feed filter works but they are independent of each other. If you have a feed filter on but don't set the filter here for MemoryBooks, all milestones across the company will show. This means that Sales could only see recognitions for Sales in the feed, but the upcoming milestones would show everyone in the company.

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. 

If you have any questions, please contact our Awardco Support Team.