How to Enable Private Recognitions

Turn on private recognitions so people can praise confidential work without it appearing in the public feed, and understand who can still see those posts.

Who can use this feature

  • Available on the Team plan and above.

  • Requires the Super Admin admin permission.

Who this is for

Admins who want to let people recognise each other for work that shouldn't appear in the public feed.

What you'll achieve

After enabling this setting, anyone sending a recognition will see a privacy toggle in the create-post form. They can mark any recognition as private before sending. Private recognitions stay out of the public feed and cannot be shared externally.

Before you begin

Once a recognition is sent, its privacy cannot be changed. There is no way to convert a private recognition to public or vice versa — make sure your team understands this before you turn the feature on.

  • Your workspace is on the Team plan or above (Starter and Free workspaces cannot access this feature)

  • You have admin.global permission

Steps

  1. Go to Admin settings → Programs → Recognitions → Rules.

  2. Find the Enable Private Recognitions toggle.

  3. Turn it on and save. A confirmation toast appears: "Private recognitions enabled".

That's it — users can start sending private recognitions immediately.

What to expect after

What users see

A lock/globe toggle appears in the footer of the recognition form on every step, not just the final screen. The default is public (globe icon). Tapping the lock icon switches to private. A tooltip confirms the current mode so there's no guesswork.

Who can see a private recognition

Giver

Feed and their own given-recognition list

Recipients

Feed and their own received-recognition list

Admins (admin.global)

Admin → Activity view only — not the regular feed

Everyone else

Cannot see it anywhere

Managers do not have automatic access to private recognitions. If a manager needs visibility, they must be granted admin.global permission, and even then they will only see private recognitions through the Admin Activity view.

Points and budgets

Private recognitions carry points exactly like public ones. The same budget is deducted from the giver's allowance, and recipients earn the same amount. Switching a recognition to private does not bypass any budget limits.

Notifications

Private recognitions still notify recipients directly — the difference is that they skip public channels:

  • Email and Slack DMs to recipients are sent as normal.

  • Slack channel broadcasts are skipped — private recognitions are never posted to public Slack channels.

  • Webhooks still fire. The payload includes a Privacy: "Private" field so integrations can handle them accordingly.

Weekly highlights

Private recognitions count toward weekly stats (for example, "5 private recognitions this week"), but their message content is never included in the highlight email. If a week has only private recognitions, the email uses a summary-only format that doesn't expose any message text.

Sharing

The share dialog and copy-link button still appear for private recognitions, so users can share a link via social media or copy it directly. However, the preview image won't generate (the share dialog shows an error for the image), and only the giver and recipients will see the post when visiting the link — everyone else sees an empty feed.

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