An online farewell card for a coworker, signed by everyone who should sign it

Elena's last day is Friday. She joined six years ago in support, built the onboarding program, survived two reorgs, and taught half the company how to write a decent incident report. Her farewell card should cover six years. Usually it covers whoever was in the Slack channel when someone dropped the link.

The people with the best things to say about Elena are mostly not on her team anymore. There's the manager who hired her, the client she stayed on the phone with through a bad outage, and the intern from two summers ago who works somewhere else now. A good farewell card goes and finds them.

What makes a farewell card worth keeping

Four things, and none of them is the border design:

• Enough time. Start a week or two before the last day, or you'll miss everyone who's traveling. Set delivery for the morning of the last day, so Elena reads it before the goodbye drinks, not after.
• The right signers. The easy list is her current team. The better list adds former teammates, the people in other departments she worked with every week, and the clients who'll be sorry to see her go.
• Room for the real note. Some messages aren't written for an audience: the thank-you for a hard conversation, or "you believed in me before I did." If people think the whole office will read it, they write "Good luck, you'll be missed!" and move on.
• Room for the late ones. Someone always hears the news on Monday. "Wait, Elena left? I'd have signed." A card that closes on Friday leaves them out.

Making Elena's card in HuddleCard

Create a Farewell card, choose who signs, and set it to arrive Friday morning. HuddleCard sends each signer their own link by email, Slack, or Microsoft Teams, nudges anyone who hasn't signed, and delivers the card on the day. Signing is a short web form: a message, plus a photo, GIF, video, or voice note if they want to add one.

People outside the company can sign. Add the client, the contractor, or the former colleague as a guest with a name and an email address. They get their own link, and they don't join your roster or add to your bill. You can invite up to 25, which covers most six-year careers.

Private notes stay private. Signers can't see each other's messages before the card arrives. Anyone can also mark their message private, so only Elena reads it, even if she shares the card later.

Late signers still get in. The card stays open after Friday. Anyone who missed it signs from the same link, and Elena hears about the new messages without a ping for each one.

A gift, if you want one. The company can attach a gift card while you create the card, and Elena picks the brand. Nobody passes an envelope around. Here's how gift cards on group cards work.

If the card is a design project

Board tools like Kudoboard are built for moments like this, and their templates and board polish are hard to beat. If you want a custom look and lots of control over the layout, they give you more of that than we do. HuddleCard puts its effort into the signer list instead: inviting the right people one by one, and reminding the ones who forget. We make HuddleCard, so weigh that accordingly. For the full comparison, see HuddleCard vs Kudoboard.

Common questions

Keep reading

• Thank-you cards for employees: from a leader to everyone, or from one team to another.
• Group cards with a gift card: company-funded, and the recipient picks the brand.
• Guest signers in the Help Center: inviting people from outside the company, step by step.