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Five Ways an Editorial Calendar Can Help Your Community

June 3, 2022 By Jim Storer

Five Ways an Editorial Calendar Can Help Your Community

One of the most common questions we get from members is,  “How do I increase the value and the volume of member engagement?” This challenge persists across all community types, sizes, and use cases. One way we’ve found to increase audience engagement, in terms of both quality and quantity, is to implement an editorial calendar for your community programming.

Five Ways an Editorial Calendar Can Help Your Community

1 – The basics

An editorial calendar helps you organize and create context for the content in your community – a repeating, time-specific template for member content and programs. A typical community editorial calendar consists of two major components: A time period during which specific forms of content or programs repeat, and a topical focus that may shift.          

This is an example of a two-week editorial calendar. The core programs are set and listed on specific days. The topical content is then plugged into the formula.
You can see that once the two-week period of time is up, the topic shifts to Live Events. The structure of the editorial calendar remains the same, while the content it focuses on shifts.

2 – How editorial calendars help community managers

Most communities have a lot of content. It can be tough for members to find their way. An editorial calendar does the hard work for them.

An editorial calendar allows you to channel fresh streams of content into regularly recurring programmatic anchors that your members know how to navigate. This creates familiarity and comfort for your members, which increases long-term engagement.

Editorial calendars also boost efficiency for your community team – even if that’s just you. Because the program design remains the same, a community manager can spend more time creating and curating the content.

3 – Editorial calendars = stability + freshness

An editorial calendar formally introduces a cyclical timeframe into your community program. Now, they know what to expect and when to expect it. Since the topic of each cycle shifts and different collaborators are used, you can create a space for fresh content without confusion. Consider the success of widespread reoccurring events – like the popular Throwback Thursday (#tbt) on social media.

4 -Don’t need to reinvent the wheel

By maintaining the same time and program structure in each editorial cycle, you don’t have to create fresh content plans each week. Use the pre-designed program template to insert relevant new or evergreen content. Then you can focus on the value of the content itself.

5 – Create listening and response channels

By implementing this structure, the behavior of catering to passing member interests you can easily incorporate timely content. The shifting topic cycle encourages community managers to act on community listening and plug in what members are asking for without disrupting the entire framework. Implementing this system might seem like a lot of work. However, editorial calendars actually free up your time, in the long run, to provide better content to your members.

Want more ideas? Check out these best practices for building an editorial calendar for your online community program.

Three Quick Community Wins for January

January 3, 2022 By Jim Storer

Check these three easy community management to-dos off your list and set yourself up for community success in the coming year.

A new year can be both an amazing blank slate, and also, a terrifying blank slate. If you’re back at your desk and feeling overwhelmed by your to-do list, here are three easy ways to take stock of where your community is right now, and ideas for prioritizing for the coming months. Bonus: these research-backed tools help you make the case for needed resources for your community program.

1. Check your community’s temperature.

Through a short, 20 minute survey you can:

  • Identify strengths, gaps, and opportunities – By assessing your community program in the context of your strategy and approach, you can determine where you have gaps that matter (some gaps may be intentional or OK for your context) or opportunities to improve.
  • Prioritize initiatives with the biggest impact – Your assessment will identify activities and initiatives that will contribute to your community’s goals and growth. These may be tactical activities, like programming or larger initiatives like governance and strategic alignment.

Start your community score.

2. Calculate your Community ROI

January is a great time to benchmark the ROI generated by your community. Not only does it communicate the value you are currently creating, it also helps you set goals for where you’d like to be in the future.

The formula is designed to be simple to use, and simple to explain to stakeholders – but like any ROI model, it is best used as a piece of strategy development and discussion, not just as an output.

Calculate your community ROI.

3. Create or Update your Editorial Calendar

One of the most common questions we get from members is,  “How do I increase the value and the volume of member engagement?” This challenge persists across all community types, sizes, and use cases. One way we’ve found to increase audience engagement, in terms of both quality and quantity, is to implement an editorial calendar for your community programming.

If you are already using an editorial calendar to plan your community programming now is a great time to review what worked from last year, and tweak your plans to increase engagement. If you aren’t using an editorial calendar now is a great time to draft one for the new year. This short webinar highlights best practices for building an editorial calendar for an online community program.

Ready, set, go!

We hope these three ideas help you kick-start your community initiatives for the new year. Have a specific question about any of the above? You can always ask a question in our private facebook group or send us a message.

Why Build an Editorial Calendar for your Community?

April 12, 2017 By Jim Storer

 

editorial-calendarOne of the most common questions we get from members is,  “How do I increase the value and the volume of member engagement?” This challenge persists across all community types, sizes and use cases. One way we’ve found to increase audience engagement, in terms of both quality and quantity, is to implement an editorial calendar for your community programming.

Earlier this year Georgina Cannie shared some best practices for creating an editorial calendar with members of TheCR Network. In addition to the practical tips she outlined, she also gave a great overview of the benefits of building and maintaining and editorial calendar. I wanted to share her great advice here, for any community managers considering the process.

Stability + Freshness

When you implement an editorial calendar you formally introduce a cyclical timeframe into your community program. These program and content anchors provide increased familiarity and stability to your members. Now, they know what’s going on, what to expect and when to expect it. Since the topic of each cycle is shifting and different collaborators are used, you can create a space for fresh content without confusion. Consider the success of widespread reoccurring events – like the popular Throwback Thursday (#tbt) on social media.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

By maintaining the same time and program structure in each editorial cycle, your community team (or you!) doesn’t have to create fresh content plans each week. A program template has been designed and content is plugged into it, which allows the community manager to focus on the value and the curation of the content itself.

Listening + Response Channels

By implementing this structure, the behavior of catering to passing member interests is no longer detrimental to the community effort or the community manager time due to positive reactivity. The shifting topic cycle is the perfect excuse for a community manager to act on community listening and plug-in what members are asking for without disrupting the entire framework. While it might seem like a lot of work in the beginning, an editorial calendar actually frees up your time in the long run to provide better content to your members.

Do you currently use an editorial calendar in your community program planning? What benefits have you found to introducing this structure into your day-to-day community work?

 

Best Practices for Building an Editorial Calendar

March 7, 2017 By Jim Storer

Georgina Cannie shares best practices for building an editorial calendar for an online community program, as well as a look at the research, programming and professional development available exclusively to members of The Network.

Building an editorial calendar for your community program will increase overall engagement by setting a predictable schedule for programming, but still leaves room for experimenting, adjusting and adapting to the specific needs of your community.

It’s a must-see for any community professionals that are tasked with planning, executing and managing content programs inside their internal or external community.

Fighting the sophomore slump in your community planning

January 13, 2015 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

Welcome to the second full week of 2015.

Remember the vim and vigor with which you sat down at your desk last week? The whole year was ahead of you. A clean slate. You laid out a dozen priorities for the year and… haven’t started any of them. Last week you posted “I have a lot of big things to do!” This week it was more like “I don’t know how to get these things done!”

You’re not alone. It’s human nature. It’s why something like 90 percent of New Year’s resolutions fail and most fail rather quickly.

Boston_Post_Road_map

The Boston Post Road – Wikipedia

So how do you improve your chances of success in community planning this year? Have a roadmap.

The problem with goal setting is that it just tells you where you want to go, not how to get there. We are strong believers in the power of the roadmap to connect the dots between where you are and where you want to be. Your roadmap rationalizes your resource needs, your interim goals and measures, and more. Without one, it’s hard to show where you are going on how you are planning on getting there.

But in many cases, you may need more. You may want a TripTik.

For those of you under 40 or who never got loaded up into the Family Truckster for a cross-country adventure, a TripTik was AAA’s way of dividing your long-distance jaunts into manageable, notebook sized slices that broke your big trip into small pieces. Think of your 2015 roadmap to your goals, and break it down into some smaller slices.  Going to launch a new initiative? Use your big roadmap to set all the targets along the way, and then break down those segments into manageable pieces.

At TheCR, the research and content team is sitting down to do just this.  We are breaking up our year into our core research projects, our training development efforts, our benchmarking projects and our other content projects. We do a lot of that work in Trello, laying out the projects and subtasks to better understand

Breaking it all down does three things.

  • It helps you acknowledge the little things that go into accomplishing your larger goals.
  • It gives you a chance to see where things get crazy busy and where you might have some time to invest  – and helps you plan accordingly.
  • It lets you see more clearly how the small habits and daily efforts you make feed into the larger goals. There is great power in the reminder that the profile tweak that takes a few hours of your time to set up today provides the added insights that illuminate the subject matter expertise that feeds into your ability to better find champions in your community for the program you want to launch.

Driving from Boston to San Francisco means going through Omaha.  If you don’t make it that far, all your big plans in the Bay Area don’t matter.

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