How to Add Follower, Subscriber and Donation Alerts on Stream

Sound

The same principles apply to Sound as they did to Image above. Sound allows you to set a custom music file that will play whenever an alert pops up. This can be any of the preset beeps and dings that the Streamlabs library offers, or it can be a custom piece specifically made for your channel. Keep it short and sweet, you don’t want a 20-second song playing every time you get a new follower!

Sound Volume

This is pretty much self-explanatory. Set the sound volume for the follower alert using the slider that ranges from 0 to 100%, 0 being mute, and 100 being the loudest.

Alert Duration

This option will determine how long the alert will stay onscreen before vanishing. Keep it long enough to ensure that the name can be read but don’t leave it on screen for too long. I’d recommend something around 6-10 seconds.

Alert Text Delay

If you want the image animation and sound to play before the text appears, then you can set the time delay in this option. The system will wait for the selected number of seconds before displaying the text alert. Of course, set it to zero if you want all elements – image, sound, and text – to display simultaneously.

Font Settings

That may have been enough options to make your head spin, but hopefully, you followed along to this point and now have a good grasp of the basics for setting up a follower alert. You’ll be pleased to know that all the other types of alerts will be very similar to create. But before we get to them, we still have a few last items to wrap up, scroll down and expand open the Font Settings.

• Font – This refers to how the text will be written out. It’s purely cosmetic, but you should still pick a font that goes well with your channel. Go to google.com/fonts and pick out a font that you like (you will also be given a list of the commonly used fonts if you’re undecided), then return to the Streamlabs page and type in the name of your choice in this section.
• Font Size – Hopefully, this needs no explanation. Play with the slider to increase or decrease the size of your font.
• Font Weight – This refers to how thick you want the text to appear. Adjust the slider according to your preference.
• Text Color – If black is too boring, then you can use this option to choose any color to use for your text. Remember to think about how easy it’s going to be to read on top of your gameplay (or wherever you are displaying your stream alerts).
• Text Highlight Color – The color of the Followers username. If you want to make the follower’s username stand out from the rest of the base text, then this is where you set a different color for it.

Last, but not least, we get this option:

Alert Variations

To prevent your alerts from becoming too predictable and boring, Alert Variations will allow you to add a certain level of randomization to the alert text, image or sound. If you’re happy with your previous selections, however, then you can skip this.

And we’re done! Click Save Settings to make sure all of your hard work won’t go to waste.

Scroll back up to the tabs and select Subscriptions. This is where we’ll be able to customize our Subscriber Alerts.

Subscription Alerts are for those streamers who have reached either Affiliate or Partner status with Twitch. It allows your viewers to subscribe to your channel for special benefits. Subscriptions start at $5 and Twitch will then split that amount with the streamer.

If you’re just starting out, then it’s safe to say that you will not have a partnership with Twitch. If you head to the Achievements page in your dashboard, you should be able to see a list of things you need to do in order to qualify for Affiliate and Partner status. If you don’t yet have Subscriptions enabled for your Twitch account, you can skip this entire subscription alert section. Just set the first option named Subscription Alerts to disabled.

For those of you who do have affiliate or partnership with Twitch, you’ll obviously want to enable Subscription Alerts. Most of the options here are similar to what we have already covered in the Follower Alerts section, so we won’t go through all the options again, but you will still need to customize them! You also do need to pay close attention to some unique features in this tab.

Resub Message Settings

One of the perks of being a subscriber is that the subscriber can post their own custom message when they resub on your livestream. This option allows you to show that message, as well as set its font, font size, font weight, text color, and whether or not you want to allow them to display Twitch Emotes.

If you do decide to enable resub messages, then I’d recommended that you increase your Alert Duration beyond eight seconds to allow both you and your users enough time to read the resub message.

Resub Message Text to Speech

This is similar to a resub message, but the custom message from your subscriber will be read out loud by a computer voice.

The three pertinent options are:

1. Voice – This lets you choose one of many computer text-to-speech voices as your reader. There’s a lot to choose from!
2. Spam Security – This filters useless or malicious text to prevent you from having spammy or hateful messages read out on stream. Either the low or medium setting should be fine.
3. Volume – This sets the volume level of the computer text-to-speech voice.

Finally, in the Alert Variations section, you can spice up your subscriber alerts by adding some variations. I’d recommend at least having a variation for re-subscribers. Simply change the Condition to Months subscribed is at least 2.

Click Save Settings to save your new Subscriber Alerts.

Probably the sweetest of alerts to hear happening during your stream, donation alerts are those that notify you when a user chooses to donate money to you directly. I’m sure there are better ways of spending money, but hey, who’s complaining?

Donation Settings

Before we can customize the alert, however, we first need to tinker with a few settings to properly enable donations in Streamlabs.

Click on Donation Settings found on the left-hand side of the screen (under My Account). You will be presented with a list of donation methods. Choose the appropriate one you wish to enable. Depending on which donation method you chose, you will be asked to complete some details. For example, if you selected PayPal, then you’ll be required to enter your PayPal email address. After you’ve set up the donation method, click on the “Settings” tab. There are a bunch of options here that we’ll go through briefly.

• My Currency – This is the currency type that you’ll be using in your alerts and dashboard.
• Donation Page Currency – The currency type that will be displayed in your donation page. I recommend leaving it at the default setting of Detect Automatically. This will display the currency of the detected country that your viewer is Donating from.
• Minimum Amount – The minimum amount of money that your viewers can give.
• Suggested Amount – The amount that will be suggested to a donator by default.
• Preferred Lingo – Do you want them referred to as Donations or Tips.
• Your Page – This is the URL that your viewers will have to visit if they want to donate. Make sure to include it in your Twitch profile so that your viewers can easily find how to donate.
• Allow Pro Viewers – This gives the donator the option to give a little extra money (which goes to Streamlabs) for some additional options in their donation message. This helps support Streamlabs but can also easily be disabled.
• Button Color – Choose the color for the donate button on your donation page. I’d suggest matching it to your stream design color scheme.
• Donation Memo – Here is where you can write down a few words of appreciation that will be displayed to the donator after they make a donation.
• Banner Override – This allows you to upload an image file that will serve as your donation banner. If you leave this blank, your Twitch banner will be shown by default.
• Profanity Filter – Gives you a set of options to prevent people from swearing in their donation messages. You can automatically substitute swear words with happy words, or with asterisks.
• Custom Bad Words – If the Profanity Filter is not enough, then you can add specific words in this box that you want to be edited out of the donation messages.

Click Save Settings when you’re done.

Donation Alert Settings

Now that we’ve set up our donation settings, we can go back to Alertbox and click on the Donations tab to finalize our donations alerts.

Most of the donations alert settings are exactly the same as those of the follower and subscription alerts. The options that are unique to the donations alerts though are as follows:

• Minimum Amount to Alert – This is the minimum amount that a donator has to give in order for them to get a donation alert to show on stream.
• Minimum Amount to Read – This is the minimum amount that has to be given in order for the donation to be read out loud in text-to-speech. Some people abuse the text-to-speech bot by giving small donations, so setting a floor price is useful, especially for larger channels.
• Message Template – This is the message to be displayed when a donation alert is triggered. The {amount} placeholder will be substituted automatically with the correct donation amount in your earlier selected currency.
• Alert Variations – Just like with the other alerts, you can randomize your alert for different donations depending on how large or small the amount is.

Click Save Settings when you’re done.

It’s worth noting that Streamlabs has now added the ability to show and customize alerts for people hosting you, giving bits, raiding your channel, pledging support on Patreon or buying merch. Feel free to go and customize how these alerts show and enable/disable the ones you want. You know enough now to be able to tackle these alerts on their own!

You want to be able to show off when you win the lottery and get hosted by shroud right?

Wow, that was a lot of work to set up! Well here’s where the work pays off. It’s now time to put Streamlabs to the test by applying our alerts to OBS Studio.

Follow these steps and you should be up and running in no time. If any of this lingo confuses you, I’d highly recommend reading through our ultimate guide for OBS Studio, it’ll teach you all about sources and scenes so you are confused no longer!

1. Go back to the top of the Alertbox page. Make sure all the checkboxes that you want to be activated are ticked (Follows, Subscriptions, Donations, Hosts, and Bits).
2. Just below these checkboxes is a link titled Click to Show Widget URL. Do so and a URL should appear. This is the URL that we’ll be using to synchronize Streamlabs Alerts into OBS studio. Copy the URL.
3. Open OBS Studio on your computer, change to the scene that you wish for your alerts to display in.
4. Add a new source in this scene, choose Browser Source as the source type.
5. Name the source “Streamlabs Alerts”.
6. Paste the URL that we copied earlier in the URL field.
7. Click OK to save your new browser source.

After all that hard work, you might be surprised that all you’re seeing is your scene with a red empty box. This box is essentially the location of the Streamlabs Alerts that we painstakingly set up. You can resize and reposition it roughly where you want your alerts to show. Make sure that your new Streamlabs Alerts source is at the top of your sources list so that it will appear over everything else and won’t be obstructed by any other source. You can do this by drag-and-dropping or clicking the up arrow button as many times as necessary to send it to the top.

Head back to the Streamlabs webpage in your browser. Just below the Widget URL box, you should find a row of buttons to test each of the alerts.

Click Test Follow, Test Subscription, or Test Donation depending on which alert you want to see, and quickly return to your OBS screen to preview its effects. You should hopefully see your image/gif/text play along with your chosen alert sound.

Pretty neat huh? It’s not as easy to get real subscribers while streaming…Trust me!

Now that you know how each of the alerts appears, don’t be afraid to return to the settings page and play around with the various options until you create an alert that really suits your channel’s style. Just make sure to save after you make any changes.

One final thing to note is that keeping the Streamlabs Dashboard page open in your browser while livestreaming is good practice because your dashboard lists down all the follower, subscriber, and donation alerts and messages for you, just in case you missed reading it.

Setting up alerts is an essential feature if you want to interact and form relationships with your viewers. Hopefully, you’ve managed to follow this guide about how to do that using Streamlabs, and you’ve been able to integrate alerts into OBS Studio for all your viewers to see.