During our recent webinar on nonprofit editorial calendars, we discussed several ways to improve your current work.
Here are three tips for improving your nonprofit editorial calendar and how the webinar participants responded to our questions on each of these tips.
Know Which Content Drives the Rest of the Editorial Calendar
Finding and building patterns in your work is an important way to save time and be more strategic. One of those patterns is how content creation flows in your organization. For example, do you typically start with content in one communications channel and repurpose it in others? One example would be that you often write a blog post first. That becomes a teaser with a link in an email newsletter. You also create relevant social media posts that link back to your blog.
Sometimes, it’s the type of content itself rather than the communications channel. For example, if you do a lot of events, the promotion schedules for those events may drive your editorial planning. Or maybe you do a lot of storytelling. When you’ve finished writing a story, that triggers a whole series of communications work in different channels.
There is no wrong or right answer. But knowing the answer for your organization will help you fill your editorial calendar in a more strategic way that mirrors your actual content development workflows rather than fighting against them.
We asked the webinar participants which communications channel or type of content drove their communications plan now. Here’s the word cloud of their answers:
Know What’s Most Important to See in Your Editorial Calendar
It doesn’t really matter what editorial calendar software you use. What matters is that you can see what you think is most important to see! A well-designed editorial calendar will make you feel smarter and help you keep what’s most important front and center. Knowing what you want to see first will be a huge help as you set up your software.
One of these three things is usually most important:
- The to-do list with who’s responsible and deadlines
- The topics and themes for that time period
- The stage the content is in (idea, draft, review, etc.)
In our webinar poll, here’s how the participants ranked these factors
Remember, you will likely want to see all three. But choose your first priority to drive the way you set it up.
Build Repurposing into Your Editorial Calendar
One of our content creation mantras is that every piece of content gets used in at least three ways or it’s not worth creating. That means you are repurposing everything you create into different formats, for different channels, or at different periods. As you decide how you will repurpose that content, it fills in the “second third” in our recommended editorial planning process.
We asked participants where they wanted to focus first with repurposing, and here is how they responded:
If you need more help setting up a nonprofit editorial calendar, start with our Editorial Calendar FAQ page.
