Setting Up Birthday Automation
How to enable automatic birthday messages, when they send, and what happens when a birth date is missing.
Turning it on
Under Settings, then Automation, then Birthday, flip the toggle on and choose or edit the message template. The template supports the same @@merge fields as a manual broadcast, most commonly @@first_name and @@church_name.
When it sends
Sermfy checks member birth dates daily and queues a message for anyone whose birthday falls on the current date. This runs independently of whether the member has attended recently or has an active follow-up case.
What it uses to send
Birthday messages go out over SMS using the same delivery pipeline as a manual broadcast, so they draw from the same SMS credit balance and follow the same primary/fallback provider logic.
Keep the message short. A birthday text with three or four merge fields tends to read better than a long templated paragraph.
Missing birth dates
A member with no birth date on file is simply skipped, they won't receive a message and won't show as a failure either.
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