Google Contacts Birthday and Anniversary Outreach

Overview

This flow automates relationship-building outreach for birthdays and work anniversaries. Every morning it reads the Google Contacts directory, looks up which contacts have a birthday or work anniversary today from a Dataverse registry, sends each a personalized Outlook email, notifies the relationship owner in Microsoft Teams, and logs the touch to a Dataverse audit table.

Why it matters: Personal touches build relationships but are easy to forget. Automating birthday/anniversary outreach keeps it consistent and gives a governed, auditable record of every touch.

Status: Built and verified (Flow Checker 0 errors / 0 warnings). Ships Off — going live requires only authorizing the four connections and setting the environment variable values.

Use Case

A relationship-driven team (Sales / Marketing) wants timely, personalized outreach to contacts on their special dates, without a person having to remember and draft each message. The owner is kept in the loop via Teams, and every touch is recorded for reporting.

Design Note — Why Important Dates Live in Dataverse: The Google Contacts connector's PeopleApiListContactsV4 operation does not expose birthday, anniversary, or event fields (verified limitation). To stay connector-first while still honoring the brief, the flow reads the live Google Contacts directory with the real connector action (source of truth for the contact list and current display name), and sources the actual birthday / anniversary dates from a dedicated Dataverse table (Contact Important Date), which the V4 connector cannot surface. This keeps the contact directory governed by Google Contacts while making the date-driven logic reliable and reportable.

Flow Architecture

Environment Variables

Connectors & Connections

Connector	API name	Actions used
Google Contacts	shared_googlecontacts	PeopleApiListContactsV4
Microsoft Dataverse	shared_commondataserviceforapps	ListRecords CreateRecord
Office 365 Outlook	shared_office365	SendEmailV2
Microsoft Teams	shared_teams	PostMessageToConversation

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

Greeting wording

Edit the Initialize Birthday Template / Initialize Anniversary Template values; keep the {Name} and {Company} placeholders.

Send time

Change the Recurrence schedule (default 08:00 EST).

Owner approval

Insert an Approvals action before Send Outreach Email to let the owner review the draft first.

Lead time

Add a second branch that notifies the owner one day before (match tomorrow's month/day).

Channel choice

Gate Send Outreach Email vs Notify Owner In Teams on a new env var to switch between email-only and Teams-only modes.

Onboarding the dates

Seed Contact Important Date from a one-time import or a companion flow; the V4 connector cannot read birthdays directly.

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

@{formatDateTime(utcNow(),'MM')} and @{formatDateTime(utcNow(),'dd')}

flowlibs_eventmonth eq '@{variables('varTodayMonth')}' and flowlibs_eventday eq '@{variables('varTodayDay')}'

@equals(toLower(coalesce(first(item()?['emailAddresses'])?['value'],'')), toLower(coalesce(items('Apply_to_each_Celebrant')?['flowlibs_contactemail'],'')))

@coalesce(first(body('Filter_Match_Google_Contact'))?['name']?['displayName'], items('Apply_to_each_Celebrant')?['flowlibs_name'])

@replace(replace(if(equals(items('Apply_to_each_Celebrant')?['flowlibs_eventtype'],'Birthday'), variables('varBirthdayTemplate'), variables('varAnniversaryTemplate')), '{Name}', outputs('Compose_Greeting_Name')), '{Company}', variables('varCompanyName'))

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