Discord birthday bot - Send a personalized happy birthday video to each member

How to create a Discord birthday bot

In order to create this bot, you don’t need to know any code. You’ll need only a few tools:

1. Integration tool
2. Video Automation tool
3. Airtable

You can use whatever Integration tool you wish, we’ll be using Integromat but you can also use Zapier, N8N and similar. For video automation, we’ll be using Plainly…and as far as Airtable goes - i don’t see a reason to use anything else. It’s free, and it has a ton of capabilities.

Here’s how this workflow works. You’ll create an Airtable form which will serve as the input for the birthdays. Your members will enter their username and birthday. That will then be saved, and your member will get a confirmation message.

Another Integromat scenario will be triggered automatically every day at a certain time to check the Airtable database for a birthday that’s on that day. If there are any records that match that condition it will automatically send that data to Plainly for a personalized birthday video to be made.

What’s really awesome is that you can add a Giphy module to the integration and it will look for birthday gifs for every video. This will make every video 100% unique because it will include different gifs each time.

The last scenario starts off with a webhook that will listen for new videos. Whenever there is a new video created, it will send that video to a specified channel, along with a message for that member.

When you combine everything together, you get a super useful Discord birthday bot that’s going to delight your members. Let’s explain the workflow step-by-step.

Discord birthday bot - Step by step

There are 5 steps for the creation of this birthday bot.

1. Creating the video template
2. Setting up the template inside of Plainly
3. Creating the birthday date input form
4. Creating a workflow that will create videos
5. Creating a workflow that will send these videos

Let’s dive in. Oh, and one more thing - i created a video tutorial that is more detailed and shows every little detail. if you are more of a visual person go to the end of the article to watch the video.

Video Template

Plainly uses After Effects, this means that your template will have to be in the format of an After Effects project. If you aren’t skilled in Ae you can always hire someone on Upwork or Fiver to make a template for you. If you don’t want to do that, luckily there are a ton of After Effect template marketplaces so you can just purchase one for cheap.

Here’s the template we created:

Pretty simple but effective. It also includes two gifs so we’ll be able to insert dynamic gifs through Giphy API. Bear in mind that if you also want to have dynamic gifs, you need to add placeholder gifs in the template.

This template can be improved by adding music and dynamic colors. You can basically have different colors in every video and also you can add a music track (which can also by dynamic). It’s just a matter of how much effort you want to put into this Discord birthday bot - i was going for something quick.

Setting up the template inside Plainly

This is the shortest step. All you have to do is ZIP up your project file, upload it to Plainly and choose the dynamic elements (these are the elements that will change with every render).

Here’s how this works inside of Plainly:

As you can see, it literally takes 5 minutes. Just as a heads up, Plainly supports dynamic text, images, videos, audio, and even colors - you can really create unique videos dynamically.

If you wish to see how easy setting up a video template inside of Plainly really is - book a 15 min demo and we’ll show you.

Creating the birthday input form

You’ll need a way for your users to register their birthdays. It can be done directly through Discord but it’s a bit more complicated. Doing it through Airtable is MUCH simpler and takes less time.

Basically what you’ll need to do is create a simple Airtable form that will prompt your members to enter their username and their birthday. You can also add a field for their Discord avatar (if you want) so you can personalize the video even more by adding their avatar.

Whenever any of your members type in their data, it gets stored in the Airtable database. Because they only get a confirmation through Airtable that their birthday has been saved, i thought it would be nice to get a confirmation on Discord also!

That’s why you can create a really simple automation that will watch for new Airtable records and it will notify everyone who entered their birthday through Discord.

And here’s how it looks in action:

Automated birthday video creation

This is essential automation. This is where the magic happens. Here’s how it looks:

Here’s what happens here. This workflow is triggered once per day, at the time you set it up. It triggers and it runs through all of the Airtable records. What it does basically is it looks for a date that matches today.

If it finds any record that matches that condition, it will trigger the workflow. 

After it’s triggered it will go to Giphy and it will find two gifs that contain a “happybirthday” tag. It then takes those gifs, alongside the data that is associated with the record that matches the birthday condition and it sends it to Plainly.

Plainly will then take all of that data + the video template you set up earlier and it will combine it into a super awesome personalized birthday video. In our case, the video will contain two unique gifs and the username of the member. 

In your case, it can be whatever you want - with these tools the only limit is your imagination.

Message sending workflow

The final piece in our workflow is the Integromat scenario which will take the newly created videos and send them to your members. It starts off with a webhook that will be listening out for any new videos. 

When the video arrives, it takes the passthrough data to find out for what Airtable record is that video and it then sends a message to a specified channel that includes the video alongside a nice message.

Video Tutorial

Closing words

And with that - your Discord birthday bot is done! Of course, you can expand this workflow and go beyond birthdays. You can add anniversaries, or any other important dates - the principles are always the same.

This workflow is a sure way to make your Discord server unique. Each of these personalized videos is like a small gift to your members - and they are going to love it. Because…who doesn’t like gifts?