How can I set multiple reminders for a contact’s birthday?

Question

I want to setup my iPhone send me two reminders about my contact’s birthdays. One reminder a week in advance and a second reminder the day before.

So for example, if my friend’s birthday was set to March 20th on my contacts list, I would want one reminder on March 13th, and a second reminder on March 19th.

I’ve tried changing default alert times on the built-in calendar app, but I couldn’t find a way to set multiple alerts at once.

How can I make my iPhone send multiple alerts about a contact’s birthday?

Answer 1

iCal calendars have very limited events notifications setup on iOS, not to mention Birthdays Calendar. There are some third party solutions that can add multiple alerts. Still you would have to go through each entry and add preferred notifications. I haven’t found any that can assign in batch on import.

I have around 70 birthday entries, so this would do as a workaround for me:

1. Export .iCal file from Birthdays calendar on Mac,
2. Add that file to Google Calendars and add preferred notifications to each birthday event
3. Connect Google Account in Settings of iPhone, toggle Calendars to sync
4. Set Birthdays not to display in iOS app

Answer 2

iCal by default is unable to set reminders that way but you can manually set a reminder for that person in your "Reminders" app and that will generate the results that you are looking for. Most third-party calendar apps dont even offer reminders that far apart.

Apple's Reminders app may be your best bet, unless you can find a third-party app that offers this feature.