Notifications For Specific People Or Everyone – A Complete Slack Guide

Since Slack is a collaboration tool, it’s natural that you’re going to have multiple people working across multiple channels in your workspace. At times, you may want to draw the attention of specific or all the people in your workspace.

While you can always post a message in your channels so that the members can see it, it is not going to send them a notification that you need their attention. The message will just sit there waiting for them to be read.

However, Slack has another way to help you draw people’s attention to your messages. There are actually multiple ways to notify specific or all the people about your messages in your workspace. You can use any of the available options to send a notification to the people you want to get the attention of.

Things to Know When Notifying People in Slack

Unless you’re the owner or admin of your workspace, there may be some restrictions imposed on your account. These restrictions decide who you can notify through your channels.

Many times the owners and admins restrict you from being able to notify everyone in the workspace. If they have enabled this restriction, you won’t get the option to send a notification to all the members of the workspace.

In large channels, only an owner or admin can notify everyone at the same time.

Disable Do Not Disturb to Receive Notifications

Do Not Disturb is a feature in Slack that when enabled, prevents any notifications from reaching you. You’ll use this feature when you’re in a business meeting or in a situation where you don’t want to be distracted by any notifications.

As long as the feature remains enabled in your account, you won’t receive any notifications no matter who tries to notify you. If you want to change that and you’d like to begin receiving notifications, the following shows how to do it.

Disabling Do Not Disturb Mode on the Web Version

Step 1. Open your Slack workspace and click on the bell icon next to workspace name at the top-left corner.

Step 2. When the menu pops-up on your screen, select the option that says Resume notifications now. It’ll disable the DND mode and you’ll begin to receive notifications.

Step 3. If you want to customize notification settings even further, you can do so by opening your Slack channel, clicking on the gear icon at the top, and selecting the Notification preferences option.

Step 4. You can then choose how Slack should notify you. You can configure options independently for both web as well as mobile notifications. Once you’re done, click on Done to save the changes.

Disabling Do Not Disturb Mode in the Slack App

Step 1. Launch the Slack app on your device and tap on the bell icon at the top. It’ll open DND mode settings.

Step 2. On the following screen, tap on the first option that says Turn off to disable the mode and allow all the notifications on your device.

You are now all set to receive notifications on your devices. Also, ask your colleagues to get the above featured disabled if they’d also like to receive notifications.

Notifying Specific People

Here comes the main part – to notify people. As mentioned earlier, you have multiple options to notify people of your messages and other content. All that you need to know is what tag to use so that the people you want receive a notification for your messages.

There are two tags that you’ll use to notify specific people – @here and @name.

@here allows you to notify all the active members in a channel. Using this tag, you can notify everyone who is an active member of the channel and they’ll receive a notification on their web version as well as mobile app.

@name lets you notify an individual. Of course, you’ll need to replace name with the name of that person in your workspace. This will send a notification that specific person only.

Let’s see how you can use both of these tags in your workspace. The steps are similar for both web and mobile apps of Slack.

Step 1. Open your Slack workspace and click on the channel where you want to send a notification from.

Step 2. Start typing in your message in the channel. Then, enter either @here or @ followed by the name of the person to mention them. In the latter case, a list of people in the workspace will appear and you can click on the one you want to notify.

People who are mentioned in your message will receive a notification on their devices, of course, based on their notification setting options.

Notifying Everyone in Your Workspace

If you want to grab the attention of everyone in your workspace, Slack has you covered. There’s a tag that when typed, lets you notify each and every member of your workspace whether they are active or not. However, keep in mind the tag can only be used in workspace wide channels which includes the default general channel.

The following shows how you use it.

Step 1. Access your Slack workspace and open a workspace wide channel.

Step 2. Type in your message and then type @everyone. It will send out a notification to everyone in your workspace.

Step 3. If you would like to notify all the members but of a specific channel, you can do that as well. Just use @channel instead of @everyone and everyone who is part of the channel will receive a notification.

Getting Notifications for Certain Keywords

If yours is a busy workspace, you likely see a lot of messages being posted in various channels. And if you want to find the relevant messages out of hundreds of these messages, it’s going to be a really tough task.

Fortunately, Slack lets you set up something called keyword notifications. What this allows you to do is it lets you receive a notification when your predefined keywords are mentioned in any channel.

For instance, if you happen to manage a certain product in your company, say it’s FitBit, then you can set up a notification for the FitBit keyword so you receive a message each time this keyword is mentioned in any channels.

Here’s how you set it up on both web and mobile versions:

Setting up Keyword Notifications on the Web Version

Step 1. Launch your Slack workspace, click on your name at the top-left corner of your screen, and select the option that says Preferences.

Step 2. Click on the Notifications tab on the following screen if you aren’t already there by default. Then, enter in the keywords you want to be notified about in the My keywords box.

Changes will be automatically saved.

Setting up Keyword Notifications in the Slack App

Step 1. Launch the app on your device, tap on the three-dots at the top-right corner, and select the Settings option.

Step 2. Tap on Settings under the Notifications heading on the following screen.

Step 3. Scroll down and find and tap on the option that says My keywords. It’ll let you add your keywords.

Step 4. Type in your keywords each separated by a comma. When you’re done, tap on Save to save the keywords.

You’ll receive a notification each time one of your keywords are mentioned in your workspace channels. Also, keep in mind the keywords are not case sensitive so FitBit and fitbit both are the same.