The post Three Ways Nonprofits Are Improving Their Editorial Calendars appeared first on Nonprofit Marketing Guide (NPMG).

The post How to Use Asana to Organize a Social Media and Communications Calendar appeared first on Nonprofit Marketing Guide (NPMG).

Now let’s make that tool even more strategic. Here’s one way to do that: Embed the existing communications capacity of your team into the editorial calendar and work from that as your baseline.

What Most Nonprofits Do with Their Editorial Calendars

Many nonprofit communicators listen to what is going on in their organizations and develop the editorial calendar based on the expressed needs and desires of their managers and coworkers. They also add in content that helps with their own overarching marketing goals like brand and reputation management, engagement, and awareness.

This can work, as long as what’s asked for roughly matches the capacity of the communications team. In other words, can the communications team produce the requested number of emails, social media posts, press releases, etc. in the requested timeframe? Again, in theory, this approach can work, but it relies on a fair amount of luck.

In reality, most nonprofits have too many possible things to talk about in their communications each month. If everyone on staff gets what they want, that means that the comms staff is overworked or best practices are being ignored. For example, you might end up sending out content on so many different topics that nothing really seems important.

Some nonprofits at the other end of the spectrum don’t have enough content, so they too fall short of best practices by not communicating frequently enough.

A Better Approach: Calendar Your Capacity Each Month as a Starting Point

Instead of this “wait and see” approach to editorial planning, I recommend that you build out a blank editorial calendar based on your capacity for each month. Think about how many emails, social media posts, flyers, press releases, etc. you can reasonably create without lots of stress or anxiety or burning out the comms staff.

These are what I sometimes call your default “slots” or “buckets” that will need to be filled with actual content (messaging, visuals).

Go ahead and map these out on your editorial calendar, without the content first.

Here’s how we do this at Nonprofit Marketing Guide:

We use three different Google calendars, all different shades of green. The darkest green is our private Community calendar, with buckets on Monday and Wednesday here. The mid-range green is our Email calendar, with content Monday through Thursday this week. The lightest green is the Blog calendar, with posts Tuesday through Friday in this example.

Each week of the editorial calendar looks similar to this. Some items repeat every week, like the Update Pass Holders and E-Newsletter Out emails. Others are added week to week, like the Instagram Promo email, which will promote an upcoming webinar on Instagram.

You’ll also notice “Kivi Something” as a blog bucket on Thursdays. When I know what I am actually going to blog about, I will change that on the calendar.

This is pretty typical for our capacity: We blog 3-4 times a week now, and we email something most Mondays thru Thursdays, although much of that is segmented to specific parts of our mailing list.

Even if you don’t know the actual content yet, you can put these placeholder buckets on the calendar so others can see what’s possible. Then as you negotiate what you want to talk about, when and in what channel, you make those generic buckets or slots more specific.

Adding More Beyond the Baseline

What if you need to send out more emails beyond the baseline buckets? Of course, you can do that, but it will be more of a conscious decision than just putting all of the requests on the editorial calendar.

You’ll be able to see if you can fill an empty bucket in the future, swap things around, or if you really do need to add a new bucket for the topic that came up. As you add more buckets, be mindful of the workload impacts for you and others. Remember that not every topic gets equal communications treatment and to think about the appropriate response level. 

The post How to Build Your Capacity into Your Nonprofit’s Editorial Calendar appeared first on Nonprofit Marketing Guide (NPMG).

Communications frequency is one strong indicator of effectiveness. If you don’t get your messages in front of the right people often enough, it’s hard to accomplish your communications, marketing, and fundraising goals. Ineffective communications teams reliably underestimate the frequency needed to break through to people.

Below you’ll see the median communications frequencies reported by nonprofit communicators in the 2022 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report. Within the report, you’ll also find a chart that compares the median communications frequencies to what the more effective and the less effective nonprofits reported.

When reviewing how often you should communicate, remember that what’s reported here is the reality, not necessarily the best practice.

For example, we strongly encourage nonprofits to email more often than monthly, which is the median. We also know that posting monthly on social media isn’t effective – those who are posting only monthly likely know that but are simply maintaining a basic presence rather than not using the social media site at all.

You can download this chart as a one-page PDF

The post How Often Nonprofits Communicate appeared first on Nonprofit Marketing Guide (NPMG).

I see this question like I do the communications versus marketing question in the nonprofit sector. Yes, they are technically different, but the practical reality in our sector is that they are usually done together by the same person and therefore often used interchangeably.

Same with this question.

In the corporate world, the editorial calendar is often viewed as the long-term strategic document that lays out themes and big story arcs. The content calendar is the day-to-day content development and publishing calendar.

But I prefer to think of these two terms differently in the nonprofit sector.

I use “editorial calendar” to define the document that says what you are going to publish, and when, and in what communications channels, whether that is this week or six months from now.

I use “content calendar” most often with organizations that are heavy content producers, often with program staff generating lots of long-form content about a variety of different topics that are then turned over to the comms staff to repurpose and distribute through multiple channels. So in this case, the content calendar is really about the production schedule for those long-form documents (reports, white papers, guides, etc.). The content calendar covers what is being developed when and by whom on the program side and when that content will be ready for the comms team to distribute widely. So you might think of it as the “pre-editorial calendar work.”

Now, again, this often merged into one big function by nonprofit comms staff, because it has to be. They don’t have the resources or luxury of managing both separately.

So, my bottom line: Use an editorial calendar to manage your content production and distribution overall. If you have A LOT of content being developed in your organization, then look further upstream, and embed the “content calendar” about how that content gets developed into your larger editorial calendar.

The post Editorial Calendar or Content Calendar? What Do Nonprofits Need? appeared first on Nonprofit Marketing Guide (NPMG).

We consider it an essential planning tool for ALL communications departments no matter what size as our Nonprofit Communications Trends Reports show that the most effective nonprofits use an editorial calendar consistently.

We’ve talked a lot about editorial calendars and planning over the years and have combined that knowledge into The Nonprofit Editorial Planning Starter Kit.

This 21-page e-book will show you how to get started with editorial planning, the steps you should take, and things to consider before building your editorial calendar.

In this kit you’ll get our top editorial planning worksheets and templates:

• The Big Picture Communications Timeline
• Core Topics List Worksheet
• Content Creation Frequency Worksheet
• Editorial Calendar Worksheets

And help you with:

• Brainstorming for Your Big Picture Communications Timeline
• Story Arcs for Your Big Picture Communications Timeline
• Types of Core Topics
• Deciding on a Reasonable Amount of Content
• How to Set up Your Editorial Calendar

Get Your Copy in the Free Member Resource Library

(Are you an All-Access Pass Holder? You’ll find it in your All-Access Pass Holder Resource Library)

The post Getting Started with Your Editorial Calendar appeared first on Nonprofit Marketing Guide (NPMG).

• How often should we send out ___________ ? (fill in the blank with emails, tweets, press releases, etc.)
• What’s a normal amount of content for my team to be asked to create?
• How much should I put in my editorial calendar?

Of course, the answer is “It depends.”

But here’s an exercise I recommend to our coaching clients to help answer the questions for yourself.  This assumes you’ve been at your organization doing the comms work for at least a year.

I want you to think about three different months in the past year or so when

1. You felt comfortable with the level of work. You felt like the pace was manageable and the quality of the work product was high.
2. You felt pushed, but it was tolerable for a short period of time. If you do rapid response work that comes hard and fast, you know these months. For others, it might be a time when the organization didn’t plan well or pace out the work well, and you had to manage a lot all at once.
3. You felt completely overworked. The quality of the work may have suffered. But even if it didn’t, you and/or your team suffered because you had to put in a lot of extra time.

You should have three different months in mind, one that exemplifies each of these situations above.

Now, I want you to count the work product created and published during each of those months. Count the number of emails you sent out to your mailing list, the number of Facebook posts, tweets, Instagram stories, press releases, white papers, blogs, website page updates, etc. Whatever it is that you or your team produce, count it for each of these months.

It can be helpful to put this in a chart or a spreadsheet so you can compare the pace or volume of each of the types of communications work products during each of these three time periods. Sometimes it’s not so much about the quantity of the work, but the dynamics or the culture in which the work happens, so feel free to make notes about how those months were different in those ways too.

The amount of content you created in your “comfortable” month can serve as your default editorial calendar. That’s the number of times you are going to plan to send emails, Facebook updates, and the like in a typical month going forward. Of course, you’ll adjust as needed for what the organization is doing in the future, but this is a good baseline.

A few times a year (by which I mean two or three, but no more) you can increase that default to what you did on the “pushed” or “rapid response” schedule. It’s essential that you make it clear within your organization that you can only do this a few times a year. They need to choose wisely about when to invoke this extra level of effort.

The overworked schedule? You can use this in a few ways, none of which actually involve putting that pace on your editorial calendar. 

First, if you are seeing work on the horizon that will end up forcing you into the overworked schedule, you need to sound the alarm early and loud to bring the pace back down to something more reasonable.

Second, you can use this requested level of effort (especially compared to your comfortable pace) to advocate for more resources, such as a bigger team or more contractor/freelancer dollars to help fill in as needed.

Third, you can negotiate significant trade-offs if you do consent to that overworked level of effort, like additional paid time off afterward. I don’t recommend that you really consent to this, but the reality is that it sometimes happens to you. Insist that you are rewarded for that level of effort.

And fourth, if none of that works, you can start looking for another job that won’t abuse you, knowing what you are capable of and what is too much.

If you give this exercise a try, let me know how it goes!

The post How Much and How Fast on Your Editorial Calendar? appeared first on Nonprofit Marketing Guide (NPMG).

Happy Holidays! Toward the end of every year, we spread some good cheer with some free stuff for our awesome readers like you! Today we share a new resource that has some of our best planning worksheets and tips on editorial planning all in one place.

Editorial calendars are essential to running a successful nonprofit communication program. Our Nonprofit Communications Trends Reports show that the most effective nonprofits use one consistently and that 80% of nonprofits use some sort of editorial calendar.

In this 21-page e-book, we have gathered all of our best resources on getting started with your editorial calendar and put them into one starter kit.

We’ll show you how to get started with editorial planning and the steps you should take and things to consider before building your editorial calendar.

What’s Inside:

• The Big Picture Communications Timeline
• Core Topics List Worksheet
• Content Creation Frequency Worksheet
• How to Set Up an Editorial Calendar
• Editorial Calendar Worksheets
• Editorial Calendar FAQs

Find Your Copy in the Free Member Resource Library

Want to do your best work as a nonprofit communicator in 2021?  The Annual All-Access Pass gives you the tools you need to not only do your job, but thrive in it. The Pass is now on sale for only $599. That’s a savings of $200 off the regular price and comes out to less than $12 a week. Sale ends January 8th, 2021.

The post Week of Freebies, Day 2: The Nonprofit Editorial Planning Starter Kit appeared first on Nonprofit Marketing Guide (NPMG).

The post Should You Put Social Media in Your Editorial Calendar? appeared first on Nonprofit Marketing Guide (NPMG).

There is no single right answer, although there are certainly editorial calendar trends and preferences in our sector.

Before you make the right choice for yourself and your organization, you have to answer this question: Do you have spreadsheet brain or calendar brain? Odds are EXTREMELY high that you have a personal preference for one over the other.

Spreadsheet brains like the grid. They like to see it all at once in linear fashion. The don’t want anything else to cloud what they see.

Calendar brains complain that they can’t understand anything in the grid. They need the visual structure of days, weeks, and months. They want to instantly see that flow over time, and they often want to see the editorial calendar in relationship to other things on the calendar (e.g. events, holidays).

Both are 100% valid. It’s just a different way of looking at and processing the same information. Pick a tool that has your preference as a core part of the software (e.g., Airtable if you are a spreadsheet person).

What if you have a mix of calendar and spreadsheet brains on your team? I would encourage you to explore a more robust project management software that can show your schedule in either format (e.g., Asana).

Our webinar series on editorial calendars is coming up soon. Join us for Everything You Need to Know about Editorial Calendars in 2021 on November 10 and 12, 2020.

The post Editorial Calendars: Do You Have Calendar Brain or Spreadsheet Brain? appeared first on Nonprofit Marketing Guide (NPMG).