<aside> 💡 As a rapidly scaling distributed company, we believe it's important to break down silos and introduce people from different departments and help them establish personal connections. At Oyster, we use Donut to automate that scheduling process.

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🤷‍♀️ What's Donut?

Donut is a Slackbot that can be connected to different channels with the goal of connecting people through different activities - from scheduling randomised social calls to starting "water-cooler" conversations in the channel itself.

🤔 How do I use Donut?

It's rather simple - join one of the Donut Slack channels. The Donut bot will be posting within those channels as well as prompt you when the time comes to schedule your first randomised social call.

There are a few settings you should take a look at:

⚙️ Donut Settings & Options

In the Apps section in Slack , you can add Donut (if it's not visible already) and use this to quickly access additional settings.

There are numerous things you can do from here and it acts as your main Donut command centre.

Let’s explore this in more detail:

1. 🚀 Start a Donut Channel: Everyone can start a Donut Slack channel: set one up for teams or project squads to introduce a connection element to your channels.
   • You can create a channel (or use an existing one) for:
     • Intro meetings (social calls)
     • Watercooler (small-talk topics)
   • There are additional Templates that you can take a look at by clicking on 🔍 Browse Your Templates.
2. ✨ View your Donut Intros will show you the list of all of your social calls organised by Donut.
3. 💌 View all compliments is used to read and rate compliments given to you from the people you had social calls with, as well as give them a compliment. Try to use this! It feels really special to send and receive lovely messages to others and can really make someone's day ❤️
4. 🕘 Set my working hours is used to help Donut find time suggestions for meetings with the people you are paired with.
5. ⭐ My Favorite Things will help you give some basic information to the person you will be meeting up front. This covers food, arts & entertainment, activities and personal history. It's a good way to skip through some common questions and also opens up opportunities for fun conversations.

🍩 How does Oyster use Donut?

Our main Donut Slack channel is #coffee-buddies . Everyone who joins Oyster is added to this channel by default.

👋 Coffee-buddies Intros

Donut runs a round of introductions every two weeks on Mondays and it will randomly pair all the members of the channel for 30 minute 1-1 social calls.