Build a Slack channel-activity dashboard with Claude

This is an end-to-end example: connect a data source over MCP, generate a dashboard from live numbers, and close the review loop on one link. Total time, start to shared link, is under fifteen minutes. The same shape works for any of the other examples — only the connection step changes.

Here's the finished dashboard, published to a canvas — click any tile or number to leave a comment, exactly as your team would:

The three moving parts

1. The Slack MCP server gives Claude read access to your workspace — channels, messages, threads, members — through a controlled set of tools, honoring Slack's own permission model. You approve what it can touch through OAuth.
2. Claude pulls the numbers and writes a single self-contained HTML dashboard. You iterate on it in the artifact panel until it's right.
3. Drafty turns that HTML into a stable link your team reviews. Comments pin to the exact element; Claude ships the fix to the same URL.

The generation step is fast now. The part this example is really about is the third one — getting the dashboard in front of people without losing their feedback to a screenshot circled in Preview.

Step 1 — Connect the Slack MCP server

Slack runs an official remote MCP server at https://mcp.slack.com/mcp. You connect once; it authenticates over OAuth, so no token is pasted into a config file. (Your workspace admin may need to approve MCP access first.)

In Claude Code:

Then run /mcp inside Claude Code and follow the OAuth prompt to authorize your workspace. When you authorize, grant read access only — this dashboard never needs to post messages or write to Slack.

In Claude Desktop: open Settings → Connectors → Add connector, find Slack, and complete the OAuth flow to connect your workspace.

Step 2 — Pull the numbers

Ask Claude in plain language. It uses the MCP server's read tools to fetch real activity from your workspace:

Claude calls Slack, returns the figures, and you sanity-check them against what you see in the workspace before going further. This is the moment to catch a wrong assumption — a channel you forgot to include, bot messages inflating the count, a timezone that shifts the day boundary — while it's cheap.

Step 3 — Build the dashboard

Once the numbers look right, ask for the artifact:

Claude renders it live in the artifact panel. Iterate in place — you're not regenerating from scratch:

• "Make the week-over-week change bigger and color it green when activity is up."
• "Sort the channels bar chart descending and label each bar with its count."
• "Exclude bot and app messages from every total."

Step 4 — Publish to Drafty for review

A Claude artifact link is a preview, not a stable URL — iterate the artifact and the link you already sent now shows the old version. Ask Claude to publish it to a Drafty canvas instead, so the link you share always stays current:

Claude pushes the dashboard and hands back a drafty.im/canvas/… link that renders on any device. Send it — your team opens it in a browser, no login and no Claude account needed.

Step 5 — The review loop

This is the part that's not obvious until you've done it once.

A reviewer clicks the specific tile, chart, or number they want changed and leaves a pinned comment — "this active-members count looks low, are we counting threads replies?" The comment is anchored to that element, not floating in a Slack thread. Claude reads the comments through the CLI, reruns the relevant Slack query if needed, and pushes a revised dashboard to the same URL. The reviewer refreshes and sees the change; the thread stays attached to the element.

The mechanic matters because of what it removes. A Slack message about a chart produces "the number on the left looks wrong." A pinned comment on the actual tile produces "this — count thread replies in the message total, not just root messages." One of those produces a correct revision; the other produces a guess.

Keeping it fresh

An MCP-generated dashboard is a snapshot — it holds the numbers Claude pulled when it built it; it doesn't re-query Slack when someone opens the link. For a weekly review or a Monday-morning digest, that's fine.

To make it a live canvas that always shows the current week's activity, copy this prompt — Claude sets up the refresh for you and schedules it to run on its own:

The link stays stable while the content updates underneath it — see keeping a canvas updated automatically.

What to watch for

• Read-only, always. A channel-activity dashboard needs read access and nothing more. Scope the OAuth grant to the channels you report on and leave write access off.
• Check the figures before you share. The MCP returns exactly what you ask for — if your "messages this week" query includes bot posts, omits a busy channel, or splits a day on the wrong timezone, the dashboard will confidently show the wrong number. Reconcile against the workspace once.
• The link is the deliverable, not the artifact. Share the Drafty URL, not the Claude artifact preview — that's the one you can update in place.