A Love Letter to the Editorial Calendar
COO Meredith Montalto’s ode to this fundamental communications tool
A solid communications plan must always contain a few fundamental elements to be successful: strategy, audience, messaging, and yes- calendaring. In fact, developing an editorial calendar to plan, guide and align your communications is not always convenient, but it is crucial. How do I love an editorial calendar? Let me count the ways:
- An editorial calendar makes you more intentional about ensuring key messages are delivered. Sometimes we can be so focused on getting out timely information or reacting quickly that it’s easy to forget we had other things we needed our key audiences to know but ran out of time. When you’ve created an editorial calendar, you can make sure those key messages are going out and hitting their mark even when things get chaotic.
- An editorial calendar forces you to think about the universe of programs, issues, topics, events, etc. that impact your organization or campaign and opens your eyes to things you might forget or hadn’t considered. It’s an exercise that makes you take inventory so you’re not missing opportunities to highlight a milestone or mitigate a challenge.
- An editorial calendar keeps you from saying one thing and doing another. If you know layoffs are ahead or you’re facing contract renegotiations each June, it might not be the best time for a newsletter issue highlighting how much your company is like a family and you can’t imagine how you’d serve your clients without them –only to then cut pay or have to eliminate positions. Your communications will seem hollow, insincere, or hypocritical measured against your actions.
- An editorial calendar helps keep key communicators on message. When sourced and shared widely, this tool can help keep everyone singing from the same hymnal and ensure alignment with your global communications objectives, from the C-suite to the interns.
- An editorial calendar makes it more likely you will do the work ahead of time to line up the resources needed for success. If in January you can look at your plan for a big national awareness month relevant to your mission in April, you’ll plan ahead and not wait until April 1 to start pitching your stories or writing your social media posts- ensuring your competitors don’t beat you to the punch.
So go ahead, embrace the editorial calendar. It’s work, for sure. But it’s a communications tool that will love you back if you take the time to commit.
