What you get with Premium Donut for Onboarding
Premium Donut for Onboarding allows you to set up an automated onboarding program that sends all of your new hires a standard set of messages in Slack on a preset schedule during their first weeks or months. These messages can:
Give the new hires information and tips
Ask the new hires questions
Assign the new hires tasks to complete
Introduce the new hires to their teammates
Donut can also do all of these things with other stakeholders, like managers or buddies, keeping them in the loop and helping them onboard the new hire more effectively.
How it works, from a bird's-eye view
First you (or whoever is running an onboarding program) set up a standard Template of Messages for your new hires on your Dashboard.
Then, when you have some new employees starting, you visit your Dashboard's New Hires page and add them as New Hires.
Donut takes care of the rest! Your new hires don't need to do anything — Donut will start sending them messages in Slack based on the Template you created.
Steps to get started
STEP 1: Install & sign into Donut
Click Add to Slack to install Donut in your workspace.
(If you already use Donut for Intros, then you can skip this step.)
Once Donut is installed, sign in at donut.ai via the “Get Started” option in the top right corner.
STEP 2: Set up your Onboarding Templates
An Onboarding Template is a series of saved Messages, which are the messages Donut will send to your new hires and other stakeholders. You can create different Templates for different purposes, but you'll need to have at least one to get started.
To create your first Template:
On your dashboard, click the purple New Template button on the top right
You can select from our onboarding best practices, or you can start a blank template that you'll manually fill in.
Name your Template, add a description if you'd like, and hit "Create".
If you selected from our onboarding best practices, messages will already be added to the template (you can always customize and add more).
Use the "Add Message" buttons on individual days to add your own Messages.
When you choose the settings for a Message make sure to assign it to your Template(s).
You'll also find some pre-existing Templates already in there (any Template that says "Created by Donut Team") — use those as examples and for inspiration!
Note: While you can always select a new hire's start date, the default range for when messages can be sent will always be 2 weeks before the start date up to week 53. However, we know some teams need a larger time frame. Read this article to learn how to edit the date range for a specific template.
STEP 3: Add New Hires
Now that you’ve set up an Onboarding Template, you can assign it to any upcoming new hires. To add New Hires:
Go to New Hires in the left navigation and then click the purple Onboard New Hires button.
Choose a start date and time zone for the New Hire and hit "Add New Hire." (To add multiple new hires at once or to copy & paste from a spreadsheet, check out How to add New Hires.)
Put in the new hire's work email address or slack account, choose the Template(s) that you want them to receive...
...and add any other stakeholders, like their manager or onboarding buddy. When you're done hit "Add New Hire."
That's it! Now all of the new hires and other stakeholders you've added will receive all the Messages according to the Templates that you assigned them.
Each time you have new hires starting, just add them from the New Hires tab.
STEP 4: Add other Donut admins
Other people at your company who are involved in onboarding will want to create their own Templates to help out with the onboarding process. This might include HR, L&D, Operations, IT, managers, and department heads. Also read about Company Vs. Team Onboarding.
You can give others access to collaborate on Donut and build Templates by adding them as onboarding Admins on donut.ai.
And don't forget to send them this guide to help them get started!
Check out other articles and resources in the Donut for Onboarding Help Center