Skip to main content

Send private message to someone via automation

  • September 15, 2022
  • 6 replies
  • 151 views
M
Forum|alt.badge.img+5

Hi there!
I am trying to send personal & private reminder messages via Slack to people in my team.
For that, I created automation and would now like to add a dynamic (colleague+me) channel ID which is connected to their name and therefore allows me to also put a dynamic (personalized) greeting.
However, I am not managing to get the automation working. Is it possible at all? Do you have any tips on hand?

Please don’t hesitate to ask questions in case it is not 100% clear, I am conscious that I am having a hard time describing my issue.


!

6 replies

ScottWorld
Forum|alt.badge.img+35
  • ScottWorld
  • Genius
  • September 15, 2022

It should work if you put their email address in the Channel/User field, and it should automatically create a private message to them.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

M
Forum|alt.badge.img+5
  • Marika_Vallier
  • Author
  • Participating Frequently
  • September 15, 2022

What error message are you getting?

I haven’t tested this myself yet, but I think you can just send it to their email address within Slack (i.e. put their email address in the Channel/User field), and it should automatically create a private message to them.

Otherwise, you might need to put the # symbol before the conversation ID.

This support article is missing lots of information, but it might contain something helpful for you somewhere within the article:


Thanks @ScottWorld !

A lot of our engineers are not very active via email so I would prefer to send a Slack message. Or did you mean the email would connect to a Slack message?

I have tried adding the #, but it didn’t work either.

Attached is the error message I am getting.

ScottWorld
Forum|alt.badge.img+35
  • ScottWorld
  • Genius
  • September 15, 2022

Yes, what I meant is to insert the email address as the channel name. See if that works.

 

M
Forum|alt.badge.img+5
  • Marika_Vallier
  • Author
  • Participating Frequently
  • September 15, 2022

Yes, it works, but it only sends a Slackbot message which does not attract as much attention as a private message and also doesn’t leave the opportunity for them to reply back directly.

ScottWorld
M
Forum|alt.badge.img+5
  • Marika_Vallier
  • Author
  • Participating Frequently
  • September 15, 2022

Yes, it works, but it only sends a Slackbot message which does not attract as much attention as a private message and also doesn’t leave the opportunity for them to reply back directly.


By the way, I figured that the numbers appeared because I set “length of channel”. But I had tried “value” before, and it still didn’t work…

ScottWorld
Forum|alt.badge.img+35
  • ScottWorld
  • Genius
  • September 15, 2022

Ah, that’s good to know about the Slackbot sending the message!

To have it send from a real person, I would highly recommend automating all of this using Make’s Slack integrations & Make’s Airtable integrations.

Make’s automations are way more powerful than Airtable’s automations, and you can do millions of things that you can’t do with Airtable’s automations.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable. 

I also give live demonstrations of how to use Make in many of my Airtable podcast appearances. For example, in this video, I show how to work with Airtable arrays in Make.

Hope this helps!

If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement