A Cohort is made up of a set of new hires who all start on a specific date or participants who are starting a mentorship or training campaign at the same time.
If you only have one participant/new hire starting at a time that's OK — you can have a Cohort with only one person in it. But if your team is growing rapidly then you probably start a bunch of new hires all at once and on a regular basis, in order to provide a more structured onboarding process.
When you create a new Cohort in Donut you need to provide a few key pieces of information:
The date the new hires or participants are starting. This is how you will identify the class.
The time zone for the cohort. Everyone will receive the Events at the appropriate time in this time zone. You also have the ability to override the time zone for individual people in case you have employees starting in multiple offices.
New hire or participant's company email address. Their Slack account is probably not live when you're creating the Cohort. Donut will store their company email address and automatically detect when a Slack account with that email is activated.
Slack handle, name, or company email for any other Roles. E.g. Manager or Buddy.
The Flows you'd like to add to each person. This controls which Events the participant and associated roles will receive. As an example, you may have an "All New Hires" or "General" Flow that you apply to everyone, and more specific Flows like "Mobile Engineer" or "NYC" that include additional information and Events.
Pro Tip: Copy & Paste into Donut
Many teams already have a list of the new hires, participants, their managers, and other associated people collected in a spreadsheet, so we designed Donut to allow you to copy and paste all of this directly from a spreadsheet into the Cohort builder. And don't worry if it looks like there aren't enough rows — we will automatically add enough rows if you paste a list that's longer than the number of rows available.