The purpose of Activity
Activity is the feed that appears on the left side of News. It’s a single, organization-wide, feed that captures the real-time happenings of your organization. It’s not a place to have an extended conversation, but rather it shares the ‘pulse’ of an extended group of people working together.
Shout-Outs are an important aspect of the Activity feed. Use these to recognize the contributions of individuals or teams, in a way that reinforces and examples your company values.
Activity is a place celebrate successes and track progress. It will auto-recognize birthdays and work anniversaries. Share KPI's using the API or Zapier integration. Repost your organizations social media feed.
Best practice is for teams, project managers, and leaders to ‘work out loud’ in Activity, using it to keep people informed at an organization-wide level of what you are doing and what you care about. For example, you can share updates for company-related reminders (“Remember, the all-hands meeting starts 2pm”), to project status updates (“Just wrapping up the proposal to Asper & Jones”), to the success of others (“Susan just had a great sales call, new customer confirmed for Q2!”).
Activity shouldn't be used for any personal status updates, as all User Profiles include a User Status feature for that very purpose ("Set a status..." in the Main Navigation). For other Activity tips and best practices, check out this article in our Customer Resources blog.
Table of contents:
- Creating an Update
- Adding an image or video
- Creating a Shout-Out
- @mentioning in an Update
- Birthdays and Anniversaries
- Replying to a single post
- Viewing and replying to a thread
- Filtering posts
- Deleting an Update
- Bonusly
1. Creating an Update
Who can create an Update
News Editors govern Activity. By default, all users can create an Update or Shout-Out. However News Editors can be restrict who can post to an allow list of people by clicking on the action menu at the top of Activity and selecting "Set how can post Updates".
How to create an Update or Shout-Out
If you have permissions to create an Update you will see a text entry box with "Share an Update or Shout-Out near the top of the Activity feed. To create a new Update or Shout-Out:
1. Click "Share an Update or Shout-Out" near the top of the Activity feed.
2. Type your Update of up to 175 characters (links only count as 5 characters and "@mentions" as 1 character)
3. Click "Post".
2. Adding an image or video
1. While creating an Update or a Shout-Out, click on "Media".
2. Upload your media file.
3. Click Post.
Notes:
- There’s a limit of one media file per post.
- Supported image formats: png, jpeg, gif, or bmp
- Supported video formats include: h264, mp4, mp4v, mpg4, mpeg, mpg, mov, flv, m4v, mkv, wm, wmv, wmx, wvx, and avi
- Size limits: Images: 15MB, Video: 150MB
3. Creating a Shout-Out
When recognizing a Person, Team, or Location in an Update, you can attach a Shout-Out. This gets attached to the post, much like an image gets attached. Here's how:
1. While creating a post, click on "Shout-Out".
2. Search for the Person, Location, Org Unit, etc. that you want to recognize. You can do this multiple times to Shout-Out multiple entities at once. Note that any person or group you @mentioned in your post will automatically be on this list.
3. Under "For", choose an optional Org Value that relates to your Shout-Out (or create a custom Org Value on the fly by selecting "Type your own...") then click "Add".
4. Review your Shout-Out and click "Post". Note that you can still edit words, add a media attachment, or adjust who is @mentioned.
Your Shout-Out is now live. Jostle creates notifications for everyone receiving a Shout-Out. This includes every individual associated with a Team or group that received a Shout-Out.
Setting your notification preferences
Users can set if and how they are notified from Activity. Here's how:
- Click on the action menu (three dots) to the right of your name on the main navigation panel.
- Select "My Preferences".
- Scroll down to Manage Notifications and set your preferences.
The two Activity related notification preferences are "@mentions in updates" and "Recognized in a Shout-Out", which are at the bottom of the News section.
4. @mentioning in an Update
You can @mention a Person, Team or Location in an Update. Type “@” followed by the name you want to mention and then select the correct entry from the dropdown menu that appears.
After you have selected a multipart name like “Elliot Mah”, you can use backspace to shorten this to just “Elliot” without breaking the @mention.
Note: @mentions trigger notifications for those receiving them. If you @mention a Location, for example, everyone at that Location will be notified, according to their Preferences.
5. Birthdays and Anniversaries
Birthdays and Work Anniversaries appear automatically in the Activity timeline, for people who have their Birthday and Join date entered in their Profile. Your Birthday and Join date also appear on the Info tab of your Profile.
Note: Activity never reveals the year of a birthday.
6. Replying to an Activity post
Click on the reply arrow (beside the Like icon) to reply to Updates, Shout-Outs, Birthdays, and Anniversaries.
A modal showing the original post will appear. Click in the text field at the bottom to activate the reply screen, enter your reply, and then click "Post".
7. Viewing and replying to a thread
When there are multiple replies to a post, "View all replies" will appear on every reply. The total number of replies will appear next to the reply arrow on the original post and all of its replies.
Clicking on "View all replies" link or the reply arrow will open a modal displaying the original post with all of its replies below it. You can then view or reply to a thread just as you do with a single post.
8. Filtering posts
You can control what you see in Activity via the Filter menu. Users can click the filter icon at the top of Activity and you can adjust the following settings:
- Items - indicate the type of Activity items you want to see in your feed.
- Replies - streamline your feed by hiding all replies so you only see the original post of each thread.
- Location - display only those posts made by users in a specific Location or Locations.
9. Deleting an Update
Users can delete their own Update at any time by clicking the 'X' in the top right corner of the post in the Activity feed. News Editors can also delete any post.
10. Bonusly
If your organization has an account with Bonusly (a peer-to-peer micro-bonusing recognition platform), it can be integrated into Activity alongside Updates and Shout-Outs. Learn more about our Bonusly integration here.
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