Whether you’ve been through the process of developing your organisation-wide, fully-integrated comms strategy or you just want a quick tool to prioritise your current work, a content calendar is a fantastic way of focusing your time, managing your workload and measuring success.
In this second blog of a three-part series, Duncan Robertson, Agenda senior associate for digital, outlines how to anchor your comms work in a content calendar.
In his first blog, Duncan explored how to create Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – those top-level descriptors of the success you want to achieve through your comms activity.
Since KPIs are used to measure how well you’re doing in reaching your core audiences and engaging them in your asks, your KPIs also give structure to your content calendar – namely to create a space to record, allocate and measure your comms work.
So where to start? Here’s our checklist for the information you need to put into your calendar so you can plan out what you’re doing, for whom, on what channel and when and - most importantly - why.
Identifying opportunities
We help clients think about the bigger picture, focusing on long-term aims to help grow income and influence. We avoid starting with tactics like ‘we need an app or a podcast’. It therefore seems counter-intuitive to start building your calendar by listing in date order everything you could possibly communicate – but this exercise helps spot untapped opportunities and manage workload.
Talk to your organisation’s heads of departments to find out what’s going on across these areas:
Internal cyclical activities: what has fixed dates that your members, supporters and beneficiaries need to know about, for example, your training, conferences and events, your elections, renewal letters and subs increases, annual fundraisers
Internal non-cyclical activities: what’s going on that your audiences need to know about, for example, big legal cases, fundraising or political campaign milestones, ballots for action, new services or support
Audiences’ cyclical activities: what has fixed dates that give you a chance to engage, for example, audience career milestones like their training or graduation dates or their life moments like tax return deadlines, children starting school
Audiences’ non-cyclical activities: what’s important to your audiences that you can use to plug the gaps in between the other opportunities, for example, advice on retirement or caring responsibilities; applying for a new job; making a will/leaving a legacy
Political or sector cyclical activities: what has fixed dates that you can influence or comment upon, for example, the Budget, pay negotiations, APPGs and select committees, relevant national awareness dates
Political or sector non-cyclical activities: what’s going on that affects your audiences, for example, policy announcements, consultations and commissions
Aligning your strategic goals
Once you know what and when you could communicate, then you have to figure out how these opportunities help achieve your organisation’s strategic goals. We use a checklist which is broadly around these headings:
Brand awareness: boosting name recognition, your position and your offer
Recruitment/acquisition: aligned to target audiences’ interests, asking them to join in/sign up
Retention: celebrating success, building loyalty among current audiences
Engagement: asking audiences to get involved in key activities
Influence: aligned to target stakeholders’ interests, asking them to engage
Sometimes, an opportunity helps achieve several goals, so it’s helpful to assess and agree which one or two goals you’ll focus on – unless you’re running a non-business-as-usual campaign which ticks all of the above boxes and requires all audiences to be engaged to effect change, such as a ballot for action.
Choosing your audience(s)
Once you’ve decided how each opportunity contributes to your strategic goals, you then choose which audiences need to hear from you. It’s useful to have a standard list of audiences you wish to reach – they can be broad headings along the lines of:
Potential members, supporters, beneficiaries: including any segments you usually target, for example, by persona or other unifying characteristics
Current members, support, beneficiaries: including the same segments
Elected people or volunteers: anyone who delivers services or represents you on the ground
Decision-makers and influencers: politicians, employers, advisers and campaign partners
Staff
Again, thinking about your strategic goals, not everyone needs to hear everything, so who’s most important to reach to share the information and, of course, make an ask to do something.
Aligning your channel and content
So, you know there’s an opportunity, you know how useful it is to further your strategic goals and, since you have decided upon a key audience, let’s assume you have the data and insight to know which channel or activity to use to reach this key audience.
How you choose to communicate is linked to what you choose to communicate – what is this opportunity worth in terms of time and resource? Are you looking at three social media posts and a newsletter article to share some information, or are you mapping out a series of carefully crafted messages across a range of channels to raise awareness and build engagement on a more significant topic?
Considering how far this opportunity achieves your strategic goals should drive your choices – and also means you can encourage non-comms colleagues to understand, challenge but eventually support your decisions. Analysing reach and engagement will inform your comms work and the work of your wider organisation.
Allocating tasks and managing workload
By scheduling lead-in times and analysis at the start and end of each piece of work, you’ll be able to show the time and resources required, which helps you manage your team’s workload and the expectations of other colleagues about what your team can deliver with current headcount and budget.
When we worked at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, we took the calendar to weekly cross-organisation planning meetings so everyone could see what was already scheduled, what needed to be added, and discuss any adjustments to priorities and deadlines.
If you’ve got a lot of work bunched up, then choose what’s most important, or what can be downgraded from ‘all singing’ to ‘good enough’ activity. And if you’ve got gaps, go to the audiences’ non-cyclical activity and see what’s coming up or what’s evergreen that you could promote to keep your comms flowing.
By making sure there’s a named person leading the project and tracking who’s currently ‘got’ the work – for example pick stages like draft, review, sign off, published – the calendar is also a great way of checking what’s on time and where’s there’s a need for intervention.
Choosing the right tool
Depending on the calendar platform you choose, you can go as detailed as you wish on allocating tasks, tracking status, running reports to check the balance of activity against each strategic goal or audience, even adding data and insights after the activity has taken place to show what’s working, what could be better, especially in delivering KPIs.
There are dozens of tools or combinations of tools that can help you create the calendar that’s right for you. Key functionalities to look for include:
Granular tasks and subtasks: being able to break a campaign down into individual tasks with their own deadlines, deliverables and owners is a must.
Different views to suit different conversations: see the same data as a calendar during your planning meetings, a ‘kanban’ board for your creative team, or a high-level status dashboard for senior leadership.
Tags / categories: group your campaigns and tasks by, for example, audience, ongoing activity and channel. You can then easily understand overall activity or filter your views to focus in on the detail of specific activity.
Team working: assign tasks or oversight to individuals in your team and across your organisation for accountability, and tackle potential bottlenecks by identifying moments when you’ll need to call on outside support.
Paid-for ‘software as a service’ products like Hive, Monday and Airtable come with all these features and many more built in. If you want to use everything on offer, costs can quickly mount up – particularly as these tools really work best when widely used across the organisation.
Unless you already know which product you’d like to use and have capacity to start implementing, it makes sense to begin by establishing some light-touch processes using tools you already have access to.
You can use a simple spreadsheet with lines detailing the date and columns with drop downs for: opportunity; strategic goal; audience; channel; content; lead person; deadline; status.
Link to shared documents for collaboration, use track changes for content review and ‘@’ colleagues in comments to allocate actions which pop into their inboxes. As you develop processes, make a note of the features that you really wish you had, whether that’s a calendar overview for planning meetings or a resource view for your team catch-ups. You can then bring a focus to trials of paid services by making sure you are assessing how the extra spend can increase your capacity.
When we worked with Alzheimer’s Research UK, we spent time assessing the comms team’s requirements for the calendar beyond just capturing the ‘to do’ list. We also reviewed other project management tools and spreadsheets across the charity to see what people were comfortable using and how they used them to capture, track and report on activity.
Once ARUK picked its tool, we made sure someone in comms ‘owned’ the platform, keeping it up to date and clean, and adding in the analytics and data which contributed to KPI reports.
In our final blog, we’ll be looking at analytics and insight including what to measure and how; how to present the data; and how to interpret findings into reports which inform the comms team’s work and the organisation’s decision-making.
