Automations for your Content Calendar
Content Calendars are incredibly important for communities, particularly those that are just starting and in the early growth phases. As more community members join the community but perhaps are not yet engaging and creating discussions, it falls on the community team and valued stakeholders in the organization to create content, host events and webinars, make videos, and publish articles to generate engagement and drive new and repeating visitors. As the community then continues to grow, you may also receive requests from employees across the organization to put content out into the community, and it’s important to keep a predictable stream of content from the company going into the community.
A Content Calendar is an incredibly important resource that serves a few key purposes:
- Provides visibility and a schedule of when content is going out, making sure you have a regular cadence of content and the content types are varied
- Allows for categorization of content for tracking the types of content being published in the community (for example, videos, webinars, events, posts of various types)
- Organizes the content creation process, tracking things like status and author
At its core, the Content Calendar is just that — a calendar for content. But, when you add a Community Operations lens to it, you can take it to the next level by adding automations, notifications, and a more streamlined end-to-end process.
🚦 In this article, I’ll share the Content Calendar setup that I’ve implemented at my company, including the detailed automation configurations. Our community is still very new, and of course as we continue to grow, our configuration will continue to evolve with it, but my hope is that it will help inspire ideas for your own Content Calendars.
Initial Business Requirements
My amazing counterpart, the Director of Community, is the primary owner of content, content strategy, and content management, and she had a few business requirements for the Content Calendar in addition to the typical items listed above.
- Auto-labeling or categorization of content
- Automated notifications to stakeholders writing the content as well as community team members
- Automated process steps for movement of content throughout the process.
- An intake form for stakeholders and others in the organization to submit when they have content they want to publish in the community
- A way to raise content scheduled in the Content Calendar to our community team roadmap for capacity planning purposes
- Pre-set checklists for specific types of content line items
Content Calendar Setup
I decided to use Airtable for the Content Calendar since our community team roadmap was also built on Airtable. This would help fulfill requirement #5 above, which we’ll discuss a bit later.
Before I dive into the details, here is the overall process chart:
Airtable Table Setup
*Note: I use Airtable terminology here. If you’re unfamiliar, feel free to visit this Airtable Help Article to get acquainted with the vocabulary.
I added a new table in our Community Roadmap base, labeled it Content Calendar, and created the following columns:
- Content Name (text field)
- Due Date (date field)
- Description (text field)
- Author (picklist field)
- Post Location (picklist field) — where within the online community the content will be published
- Content Format (picklist field) — this is essentially a tag or a label, e.g. Recent Issue, Announcement, Article, Tips & Tricks, etc.
- Team Member (link to our “Team” table which helps track capacity planning) — the community team member who is main point of contact for the content
- Attachment Links (text field)
- Status (picklist field)
I also have the following hidden columns that are used for automations:
- 4 Business Days Before Due Date (formula field)
- 3 Business Days Before Due Date (formula field)
- Last Modified Date (Last Modified Time field), this is used as a mandatory field for Zapier
Here is the formula setup to get 4 business/working days before the Due Date:
From this main table, and all views that sprout from it, I have rows sorted by Due Date in ascending order so that we see the sooner due dates at the top of the list. I also have turned on the “Keep sorted” toggle so that even when new line items are added, the sorting remains.
Business Requirement #1: Labeling and Categorization Automations
The first automation request was around auto-assigning a Content Format for specific parts of the community. For example, if new content is added that is for a specific Content Location, the “Article” Content Format gets populated. More specifically, the request was if the content is in the “Getting Started” category of the community, it gets assigned the “Article” Content Format.
For those who are a bit more formula-oriented:
IF Content Location = “Getting Started” THEN Content Format=”Article”
Here is how the automation was set up in Airtable:
More detailed configurations for the Trigger:
More detailed configurations for the Action to update the record:
You can easily substitute any of the variables here to make it applicable for your Content Calendar and can also add as many of these rules as you need. We have a few set up for various types of content.
Business Requirement #2: Slack Automations
Slack automations are really helpful if you want to notify either stakeholders or your community team about updates in the calendar. We have several of these set up for various situations and audiences.
For example, four working days before a Content Due Date, we wanted a Slack post in our team’s content channel (visible to the community team only) reminding us that we had upcoming content due. This was also our cue to remind the stakeholders who were writing or providing the content.
I created a view called “4 working days” and set up a filter where the “4 working days” field equals today.
From there, the automation is set up such that it triggers a Slack message when a record enters this “4 working days” view. Here is how the automation is set up:
More detailed configuration of the Trigger:
More detailed configuration of the Action, to send a Slack message. (You may also notice there are two actions associated with this automation. The first action is to update the record status, which we’ll go over a little later in the Business Requirement #3 section next.
Here’s how the Slack message looks like in Slack. I also set up different emojis for each one and have individual bot names to make it very clear what each message is reminding.
We have a handful of Slack automations throughout the process. The below list outlines Slack notifications sent to the Community Team’s content moderation channel (only community team members in it):
- When a record is added or moved to the “Queue” status.
- When a record is moved to the “In Progress” status (4 working days prior to the due date).
- 4 working days prior to the due date (mentioned above).
- 3 working days prior to the due date.
- On the publish date.
- When a record is moved to the “Published” status.
- When the content submission 🚨 intake form is submitted (more on the intake form later) 🚨
Here is a list of the Slack notifications sent to a wider Community Content Slack channel (with stakeholders in it):
- (Manual) A reminder 4 days before due date. This is manual because some stakeholders are more proactive than others on providing content.
- (Manual) A reminder on the due date that content is due and to please publish. Again, this is manual depending on the status of the content.
- When a record is moved to the “Published” status.
Business Requirement #3: Process Automations
Going back to the “4 working day” automation, you’ll recall there were two actions. We went over the Slack notification, but the other action is to move the Status from “Queue” to “In Progress”.
Here are the action details:
Business Requirement #4: Content Intake Form & Automations
A content intake form is probably not needed when your community is still in the early stages, but as the community and its popularity grows, you can find yourself in a position where many people are trying to get their content in the community. From shepherding questions from the stakeholders to the scheduling and publishing, this can quickly become overwhelming if you have people contacting you from different channels (like if someone Slacks you, whereas someone else emails) about all sorts of various content opportunities.
The content intake form provides a streamlined and centralized place where stakeholders can submit content requests or ideas they’d like to publish in the community.
One of the cool things about Airtable is their Form view, where you can transform your table into a form. The table columns become questions on the form and you can update how the questions are worded (great job on this, Airtable). Here’s a bit of how our intake form looks like:
When the form is submitted, it triggers an automation that does two actions. Here is the overview of the automation:
In this automation, the trigger is when the form is submitted:
Then, there are two actions that spark from it. The first is a Slack notification that alerts the community team. This uses the same configuration as the other Slack automations discussed above.
The second action is one to update the status, which is not filled out by the form submitter. We want all content form submissions to go to the “Queue” status. Here are the action details:
Business Requirement #5: Content Calendar and Community Team Roadmap Visibility
If you’ve read any of my previous blog posts, or know me, like, at all, you’ll know how much I value roadmapping. As I was setting up the Content Calendar, it was important that it wasn’t in a silo from the roadmap, particularly from a capacity planning standpoint. My amazing counterpart who I mentioned earlier, the Director of Community, does spend time on each piece of content published by our stakeholders, whether it’s answering their questions, providing copy or tone feedback, or helping them with the actual process of publishing. This effort should be tracked and incorporated into her bandwidth, which is part of the scope of our roadmap.
As such, I set up the Content Calendar table within our Community Team Roadmap base and have an automation set up where any Content Calendar record that is moved to the “In Progress” status will get duplicated over to the Roadmap table. This automation actually takes place in Zapier, rather than Airtable.
This is a three step Zap:
The first trigger is based on a New or Updated Record in Airtable, for any new items added to the Content Calendar table:
The second step in the Zap is a filter to only continue the Zap if the Status is “In Progress”.
The last step in the Zap creates a new record in the roadmap table, auto-filling the name of the record (aka the content name) and due date from the original record in the Content Calendar, and also fills in other columns in the roadmap table that doesn’t exist in the content calendar table. The screenshot below shows the first few fields in the Zap. I didn’t include a full screenshot because our setup is probably significantly different and irrelevant to your roadmap setup, but hopefully you get the idea.
Managing each piece of content takes minimal time, so each record is added with an Effort Rating of 1. (Check out my article on roadmap capacity planning if you don’t understand what an effort rating is). This way, when items are added as “In Progress” (i.e. when most of the work would take place), the effort is calculated into the team’s bandwidth.
I’ve also then set up automation such that when a record in the content calendar table is marked as Status of “Published”, the record in the roadmap table is also marked as “Complete”. This is a four step Zap:
Step 1 in this Zap is the same as the other one; the trigger is based off of a new or updated record in Airtable. In Step 2, we only continue the action if the Status = “Published” in the content calendar table.
In Step 3, Zapier will find the corresponding record in the roadmap table and is set to search by the content name:
Then lastly, in Step 4, the roadmap record is updated the reflect Status of “Complete”.
With these two Zapier automations, there is better team visibility into content that is currently “In Progress” and also allows for visibility and updates within our roadmap.
Business Requirement #6: Checklist Automation
The last business requirement was to automatically create pre-determined checklists for specific types of content. Elaborating on this, if there is upcoming content that was a specific content type, our internal checklist was the same and consisted of steps like reminding the content owners, reviewing drafts and tags, and then after publishing, marking it as featured content (if applicable). This request was to essentially duplicate this checklist for specific content matching the content type.
I created a new table and called it “Content Checklist Tasks”. This is where the checklist tasks would populate:
Next, I worked on the automation.
The trigger for this automation was based on when a record entered a view, which I had created for this particular content type.
Then, there were 5 checklist items that we wanted added for this content type, and so there are 5 new records created in the Content Checklist Tasks table.
Now, whenever new content was added to the content calendar that matched the content type, there would be five new records added to the tasks table. This table was then grouped by the content, so it was easy to see, by piece of content, its associated checklist of tasks.
Tiny + Tiny = Big (and a few other closing items)
Truth be told, I don’t think any of these automations are groundbreaking or crazy genius. I think they are tiny process efficiencies that help make things easier. However, it’s important not to discredit the tiny (as someone who is only 5'2", I think this principle applies to a lot of everyday topics!). Adding up all of these individual automations, it does end up saving a significant amount of time and effort for our team. It also adds a lot of value in organization and prioritization of the content that is published by us in the community.
At the end of the day, the way you set up your content calendar and its operations is completely dependent on your organization, your community, and how you want your calendar and processes configured. Start by thinking about how you want your team and others to use the calendar, what fields you want to track, how you want to organize, and then think about the bottlenecks, points of automation, and even the parts that should stay manual. From there, you can start building!
I hope you found this article helpful. I’d love to hear how you’ve set up your content calendar and its processes. Feel free to drop them in the comments below!
Lastly, if you are looking to implement or improve the content calendar for your team and need some extra help, don’t hesitate to reach out to me at thecommopsgal@gmail.com. This was a very long and detailed post, so here is your Yoshi reward of him taking a nap. Hopefully this post didn’t want to make you do the same. 😆
