Article Overview: Managers have to juggle many responsibilities, and running an impactful and successful corporate gifting program can be a lot of work. SnackNation dove into the ways you can leverage technology to automate corporate gifts to skip the headaches and make employees happy.
Gifting in the workplace is only becoming more important, and there are plenty of reasons for this: be it to improve morale, provide recognition, or build an office culture, gift giving serves plenty of purposes.
But the growing number of occasions where gift giving is appropriate can be overwhelming; it’s a time drain for HR departments and mistakes are easy to make.
Automation is emerging as a prime solution for managers looking to run a seamless gifting program without having to juggle a million steps along the way. It takes out much of the grunt work, allowing gift giving to be set up and left to manage itself.
If this sounds like your corporate gifting fairy godmother, then let’s read on to learn more!
Do you need help managing your order? These automated gifting programs offer a range of unique employee gift ideas while managing the process from start to finish:
| Goody | 🛒 An all-in-one corporate gifting platform | Visit Goody |
| Swag.com | 🧢 Send customized swag from 1 to 1,000 items | Visit Swag.com |
| Stadium | 🛍 Set up a custom corporate gift shop | Visit Stadium |
| SnackMagic | 🍿 Deliver healthy snacks to your employees | Visit SnackMagic |
| CorporateGift.com | 🤔 Let employees choose their gift | Visit CorporateGift |
| 👉 Explore the Holiday Gift Guide here 🎁 |
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Reasons to Automate Corporate Gifting
1 Frequency of Gifting
There are plenty of gift-worthy moments that an HR team needs to consider.
Let’s look at just a few of them:
- 🎂 Employee birthdays
- 📆 Work anniversaries
- 🏆 Employee milestones (sales targets, project completion, years of service)
- 👔 Promotions and transitions to new roles
- 🧳 Onboarding and completing first week at work
Trying to manually keep track of this for tens of employees through a web of spreadsheets is nothing short of a headache. With automation, nothing is forgotten, and nobody needs to cross-check each and every day against each and every employee.
2 Save on Time and Resources
Let’s face it: no team in the corporate world is desperate to take on extra work. But doing the corporate gifting process manually does just that – it requires sourcing, ordering, tracking, and personalizing gifts…each and every time.
Automating the process with gifting platforms significantly reduces administrative burden, as it allows for one-time-setup and then casual upkeep moving forward. The managers and HR at your company will undoubtedly thank you for making their life easier.
Remember, time is money: the longer they spend on gift giving as a task, the less attention they give to business-critical tasks.
3 Cut Down on Mistakes
When it comes to corporate gift giving, there are plenty of common pitfalls. While the obvious one is simply forgetting things (when was John’s birthday again?), there can be shipping delays, wrong addresses, duplicate gifts or inappropriate gifts.
Automation ensures consistency and reliability in your gift giving practices, as everyone gets a thoughtful gift and nobody is left out or forgotten.
It also ensures gifts get to the intended recipients: while the stranger living at your employee’s old address probably appreciates an unexpected surprise, it’s not really the goal.
How to Automate Corporate Gifts
Step 1: Identify Your Main Goals
There are plenty of reasons to automate your corporate gifting process: figuring out yours is key to setting up a system that works for you.
Are you trying to improve employee retention or simply improve morale? Or perhaps you’re looking to build stronger relationships with your clients by sending them a goody here and there.
It’s also worth considering why you’re revamping the current system you have: are you looking to save time for your departments, or is it more about scaling the experience up for a growing team? Your goals will define your gift giving strategy, and need to be properly considered before any decisions are made.
Pro-tip: At a little over 90 seconds, this video does an excellent job breaking down how an automated gifting program works. Check it out!
Step 2: Conduct Your Research
While automating gift giving saves time in the long run, it requires some initial work to set-up. There’s some key information you need to get from all of your employees:
- Emails
- Addresses
- Birthday
- Work anniversary day
- Dietary restrictions
- Alcohol restrictions (Do they drink alcohol)
- Recognition preferences
- Employee milestones
Gathering this doesn’t need to be a major challenge, though. You can use surveys and tools to quickly gather information from all your employees and import it into your gift-giving platform once selected.
Managers can also resend these surveys now and then so people can update their preferences over time, and they always get a gift that’s right for them.
Email newsletter The Assist created this preference sheet as a quick sheet for new employes to fill out during onboarding:
Step 3: Identify a Resource to Work With
There are lots of employee gifting platforms on the market that you can use to automate your process. It’s all about finding the right one for you, though.
Some key features to watch out for are things like catalogue variety, customisation, budgeting tools, and integration with other HR systems. Each of these aspects will have differing importance based on your internal policies and company direction, so it’s crucial to consider which carries more weight for you.
Before committing, make sure to ask questions! Gifting services are happy to help tailor their service to meet a variety of needs. If you find a service you love but it’s missing one or two features you’d like, reach out and see if they can add them in for you or provide workarounds.
Need some help?
We tested out a few trusted gift services that offer automated corporate gifting for teams!
• Shop thousands of gifts on the largest marketplace dedicated to business gifts • Manage users, budgets, and permissions to enable gifting across your organization • Let employees purchase apparel and other merch from your company store and ship on-demand |
• Gift 1,000+ people at the same time with just emails: Recipients provide shipping info themselves • Recipients can swap gifts for alternatives if they prefer • International gifts to 140+ countries |
• Branded company shops for around-the-clock gifting • Swag and merch that can be designed for any event or occasion • Custom campaigns to streamline sending across the globe |
Step 4: Test Your Service Before a Full Launch
Pilot the system you’ve selected with a small group before going company-wide.
You can’t be sure it’s right for you until you’ve actually seen it in action, and jumping in at the deep end can be disastrous.
Make sure to verify things like delivery speed, the correct recipients, and that they’re high-quality products. Speak to your employees in the trial, too! Gifting is for their benefit, so their experiences are what really matter!
Smart team leaders will compile this feedback from their employees before scaling up the program. This can help tow rok out small kinks or blind spots that you have to discover as you develop a program that works for your company.
Pro-Tip: Depending on the gifting service you select, many of them will provide a free sample for you to test out. For larger swag orders that require company branding, a test item can be super helpful to make sure you are 100% happy with the product before you order boxes and boxes of them!
Step 5: Integrate with Your Tech Stack
Only through integration can you have true automation. There are plenty of other software tools you might want to connect your gifting system to including:
- Employee recognition platforms
- HR Tools
- CRM or Sales software
Integrations provide more ways of ensuring no one is forgotten in the gift giving process, or more easily tying gifting to certain milestones (hitting targets, promotions, etc.).
Most gifting platforms have easy ways to connect with your existing tech stack for ordering gifts at a moment’s notice.
Step 6: Define Your Budget
Gifting is great, but it should never become a red flag for your finance team. It’s important to make sure that limits are set for any gifting platform to ensure excessive spending never becomes an issue. Most have in-built ways of managing gifting budget, so look out for:
✅ Per-gift, per-occasion, or annual budget limits.
✅ Dashboards that help to track overall spend across certain periods.
✅ Automation rules that prevent surprise costs.
Step 7: Launch Your Program!
Now that the set-up is complete, time for the run bit! Hit the “I Believe” button and begin to see your new automated corporate gift program take flight.
You can either roll it out in phases or all at once, but phasing often helps make the internal adoption process go more smoothly.
Here’s a quick checklist for a successful launch:
✓ Communicate clearly across multiple channels: Let your organization know that you are providing a more systemized rewards program. Spread the word!
✓ Set a rollout schedule (phased or all-at-once): Consider who will be handling the management of this program and what training they will require. With employee birthdays and work anniversaries coming up, getting ahead can help avoid a lot of stress!
✓ Brief team leads or department heads: Before launch, you’ll want to make sure all your information is completed and that no employee will slip through the cracks! Working with tea leads or department chairs will ensure you establish buy-in from the start.
✓ Track initial engagement and reactions: This checklist item is key because it will determine how you evaluate your new gifting program and what changes you want to implement during phase 2. The trick is to take what is working and to continue to take the program to new heights!
While the work may never truly be done, a successful automated gifting program will help to avoid last-minute rushed gifting that creates a stressful work environment and leads to unwanted mistakes. Hopefully, within a few short weeks you’ll be well on your way to a more involved company that celebrates employees without too much fuss.
Step 8: Achieve Buy-In
Courtesy of Goody
Announcing the new gifting system is one thing, getting your employees to adopt it is another entirely. Beyond company-wide emails be prepared to highlight benefits to managers so they can encourage use from their teams.
The era of emails being the main way companies communicate is coming to an end, too: odds are, you use Slack, Microsoft Teams, or something similar.
Put the word out across any communication channel you can, and make it fun! This perk will be as impactful as far as you take it, so communicating with your entire organization that this service is available to managers and employees will help this program achieve success.
Step 9: Get Feedback, Make Adjustments
It would be nice if your new gifting automations worked perfectly from the outset, but that might not be the case. Have conversations with your employees to find out what’s working and what isn’t: keep iterating on how you reward employees and match the team’s needs.
You can do this in the form of surveys to collect feedback or engage in 1-1 sessions to get more in-depth thoughts. Remember, your gifting platform is there to help – if things aren’t working, they’ll be the first to lend a hand.
Use Cases for Automating Corporate Gifting
Client Gifting
Your client probably likes you. They’ll like you even more once you send them some shiny new golf clubs.
It can be difficult to remember important dates in client relationships, though: something like a contract anniversary easily slips through the cracks.
Beyond thoughtful gestures, automated client gifting can drive real business outcomes. It strengthens long-term relationships, reinforces your brand during key milestones, and can even support account-based marketing (ABM) strategies. In competitive industries, a well-timed gift can be the small nudge that tips the scales in your favour and keeps a client coming back.
Employee Gifting
The process of employee gifting is delicate and sometimes complicated. Getting it wrong can damage your relationship with them, be that forgetting key dates, or sending something inappropriate (someone who doesn’t drink won’t want a bottle of wine, however fancy it is).
Use automations to ensure everyone gets something they want, and all their important anniversaries are remembered.
Corporate Gift Shop & Online Swag Store
Here’s a fun one: some platforms let you set up a branded storefront where employees can pick their own gifts.
It gives them plenty of choice but still remains fair, as you can choose the budget for each employee. Maybe one wants 10 pairs of socks for their birthday and one wants some new cufflinks: while the same monetary value, each gets something they actually want.
There are plenty of things to consider if you think this is the route for you.
Pro-Tip: Check out Stadium to set up a customized corporate gift shop or swag store for your company.
