Calendar.ly — CLOSED BETA Launch

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Calendar.ly

4 min readDec 19, 2018

A year has passed since we started coding in December 2017. 2 Developers and myself working hard to make Calendar.ly a reality.

Here we are. Ready! Our CLOSED BETA is LIVE. Want to be part of? go and sign up now at www.calendar.ly

ATTENTION. This is a BETA.

A Beta means that we are fine tuning the app. You might see some hick ups here and there, some elements might not be fully intuitive. Sometimes things might take slightly longer to load. Sometimes you might wonder, what were these guys thinking!?.

We’ve been thinking how to develop the best tool to help you drive efficient content creation activities in your team, but part of the journey is learning from you on what is relevant for you and what is not. This is the only way for truly delivering what you need.

I already signed up!

If you have already signed up, be patient, we are allowing access to Calendar.ly in small batches. You will receive an email soon with the invitation!

OK, I got an invitation!

GREAT! you are one of the chosen ones!

It is simple. Click on the email link. Sign up and you are in! Make sure to take the welcome Tour to get yourself acquainted to Calendar.ly. Here is a little summary for the ones that clicked on “end” tour too fast.

Creating

In the top right corner you have a + button.

This button will display the 3 main elements you can have in Calendar.ly

Create topics
Create Posts
Add members

Creating a Topic

By clicking the Create Topic button

you will create a new element in Calendar.ly.

What is a Topic?

A Topic is a way to group Posts (the smallest element in Calendar.ly).
A Topic can be a campaign, a product launch, a content pillar, a..you guessed it a topic. It is used to group elements. A Topic is optional, you don’t necessarily need to assign Posts to Topics, but when you have a lot of creative elements in a Content Calendar, grouping them can help you keep things organized, make sure you are making progress on all your Topics and flag easily when things are going off plan.

Creating a Post

By clicking on the Create a Post button

you will create a Post element in Calendar.ly

Tip: you can also click on a date in the calendar view!

What is a Post?

A Post is basically a consumer facing element. It can be a Social post (text, video, image), it can be a Blog post, it can be a website landing page. Any marketing collateral which is going to be part of your Content strategy to reach users with valuable information. A Post can have a Topic, optionally, as we mentioned before. It has to have a Date and an Hour, a Title and at least one Social Profile. These elements are mandatory as it will give the team the basic information to drive forward the creative process.

A Post element in Calendar.ly is basically your brief to the team. Here you can define what the team should work on. It needs to be clear, single minded and to the point. You can attach extra information, research data, visual examples, raw assets…anything you can imagine which will help your team work independently and without distractions. It is your task to empower your team by giving them only the necessary information to deliver the best content for your target audience.

Members

Calendar.ly is about agile collaboration. A team needs to share the same project and work together to deliver great content. Happy users and followers are the best gift a creative team can have. The key is to have a great functioning team and clear objectives.

A project has a Project Owner. This is the user who can invite others and also make changes in project settings, plans, permissions, etc.
Members are users a Project Owner invites and who will work together. Within Members you can have several types: copywriters, designers, stakeholders. Each of them can have different roles in the creative process.