Church Admin Plugin

Happy Birthday Email

⭐ Premium

The Happy Birthday email is sent automatically each morning to anyone in the directory who is celebrating their birthday that day. It respects individual communications preferences — anyone who has opted out of emails will not receive it.

Go to Church Admin → Key Dates → Happy Birthday Email.

Email sender settings

Four sender fields control how the email appears in the recipient’s inbox:

  • From name — the name shown as the sender, for example St Andrew’s Church
  • From email address — the address the email is sent from
  • Reply name — the name shown if the recipient hits reply
  • Reply email address — the address replies go to; can be different from the from address if you want replies to go to a specific person

Email template — for adults

Set the subject line and message body for the email sent directly to the person celebrating their birthday. The message is edited using the WordPress editor and supports HTML formatting.

The following shortcodes are available in both the subject and message body:

  • [first_name] — the person’s first name
  • [last_name] — the person’s last name
  • [email] — the person’s email address
  • [cell] — the person’s mobile number
  • [age] — the age they are turning today
  • [date] — today’s date

Email template — for children

When a child’s birthday is detected, the email does not go to the child — it goes to the head of household instead. A separate message template is provided for this, with two additional shortcodes available:

  • [child_name] — the child’s name
  • [parent_name] — the name of the head of household receiving the email

The same sender settings apply to both the adult and child versions of the email.

Enabling the automation

At the bottom of the screen, tick the Happy birthday to individual checkbox to enable the automation. Then tick the member types it should apply to — for example you might only want to send birthday emails to Members and Regular Attenders, not to everyone on the Mailing List.

Click Save. The automation is scheduled to run from 6am the following morning and will repeat daily from then on.

To disable it, untick the checkbox and save. The scheduled automation is removed immediately.

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