Working in Slack means your channel topic is basically the team's bulletin board. But in a busy channel, it's easy to forget to update it—leaving outdated info like last quarter's strategy or last week's on-call schedule front and center.
Don't let Slack chaos rule your (work) life. When you throw automation into the mix, everyone gets the context they need, where they need it. Whether you're updating who's on call, sharing the latest meeting agenda, or highlighting important team documents, keeping your Slack channel topic up to date helps your team stay aligned.Â
Here's how you can use Zaps—Zapier's automation workflows—to update your Slack channel topics automatically based on your calendar, tools like PagerDuty, or whatever else happens in your workday.
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Why should you automate your Slack channel topic?
Changing a Slack channel topic sounds like a tiny task, but doing it consistently takes effort—especially when you're jumping from one task (or crisis) to the next. Automating your channel topic helps:
Set clear expectations across the team
Reduce the need to ask basic questions
Avoid confusion around who's on call or what the channel is focused on
Save time and mental energy
Even better: you can tailor your Zaps to match the way your team works.
Discover how to automatically update your Slack status
Update your Slack channel topic for on-call schedules
If you're on an engineering or IT team that handles incidents, your team probably lives and breathes incident management apps like PagerDuty.
Knowing who's on call is critical, but manually updating a Slack channel topic? That's one more thing that can slip through the cracks. And when you're dealing with major outages or customer issues, the extra time spent trying to track down the on-call engineer can have a big impact.
This Zap looks up who's on call each day and updates your Slack channel's topic so the entire team knows who's got point.Â
Just customize what time you want the Zap to run, and you're set.
Update Slack channel topic with on-call user from PagerDuty
Step-by-step guide to building an on-call notification bot.
Update your Slack channel topic from your calendar
Your team calendar is packed with events that matter to the whole group—like team meetings, client calls, or weekly planning sessions. Instead of pinging everyone to remind them what's happening, you can let your Slack channel topic do the work.
Use a Zap that monitors your shared Google Calendar for upcoming events and updates the channel topic automatically. For example, if you have a recurring team standup every morning, the channel topic can change to show "Team Standup at 9:30 a.m.—Zoom link in calendar" right before the meeting. Or, if there's a big sales call coming up, it can switch to reflect that so everyone stays prepared.
Update Slack channel topics with new Google Calendar events
Pro tip: Want to only update your channel topic for certain meetings? Add a filter step to make sure only the most relevant events are reflected in your channel.
Highlight the latest meeting notes or team updates
Running an async standup or a meeting that doesn't require everyone to join live? Or have important summary or strategy docs the team needs to keep top of mind throughout the quarter? Use your Slack channel topic to point people to the latest doc or agenda.
For example, if you drop new agendas or team notes into a shared Google Drive, Notion page, or Trello board each week, you can use one of these Zaps to automatically update your Slack status:
Set Slack channel topics from new files in a Google Drive folder
Update Slack channel topic with new Notion database item
It keeps the whole team aligned and makes it easy for everyone to find what they need without hunting through channels.
Pro tip: Want to customize the channel topic based on your documents without manually writing copy? Add an AI step with ChatGPT or AI by Zapier to automatically draft unique copy for you.
Keep Slack updated automatically
Automating your Slack channel topic isn't just a nice-to-have—it's a small way to reduce clutter, improve transparency, and give your team the info they need, when they need it. With the right Zaps, your Slack channels can practically manage themselves.
Whether you're highlighting the latest meeting doc or letting the team know who's on call, Zapier helps you keep your channels relevant without anyone needing to remember to update them.
Ready to build your first Slack channel topic automation? Start here.
