How to Create a Content Calendar for Your Nonprofit Blog
Maintaining a nonprofit blog can help you bring more visitors to your site, engage your community, and amplify your message. But if your organization is like most nonprofits, your team is always strapped for time. A content calendar can help you stay organized and on track with creating regular blog posts for your website.
Whether you're just getting started with blogging or you've been at it for a while but want to better organize your strategy, a content calendar can help. Try these tips to put together a calendar that helps you get your ideas in order as you create great content for your community.
Find a calendar template. To start, find a content calendar template that makes sense for you and your team. If you're using a content management system (CMS), it may come equipped with a content calendar that you can use for planning. There are also plenty of options for content calendar-specific software, or you can create a calendar using Google Sheets. Try an option from Hubspot if you're looking for ideas.
Write down your focus or audience for each post. It can be helpful to include a section on your calendar that makes note of your target audience and/or keyword for each blog post. Identifying your focus for the blog is a good check on your team to make sure you're sticking to a strategy. If your blog post is targeting a particular keyword to help your Search Engine Optimization efforts, including that keyword in your calendar can also help you stay organized.
Include other events and campaigns. You can also incorporate your nonprofit's major events, media plans, and other large campaigns such as disease awareness months in your calendar and align planned blog content with them.
Blog about a mix of topics. One helpful step when planning content is to make a list of the different audiences your blog will speak to. For example, your target audience may include patients, caregivers, volunteers, and donors. While those categories may overlap, of course, thinking of separate audiences and the kind of blog posts they would be interested in can help you with brainstorming. Antidote created a list of 20 nonprofit blog post ideas that can also jumpstart your brainstorming.
Include a distribution plan, too. Help make sure your great blog post gets out into the world by including how you'll share it in your calendar. You can include which social networks you plan to use, whether there are any supporters you can share it with to help get the word out, or if you'll include it in your email newsletter.
Stay ahead. The farther in advance you can plan out content, the better, but depending on your workload, it's reasonable to start small. Try planning content a week or two out, then see how much further you can plan from there. Of course, you can create the perfect content calendar, but you will still need to deal with unexpected news and other changes. Keep your calendar flexible and feel comfortable shifting planned content around to accommodate breaking news or other updates from your nonprofit. It's also helpful to have ideas for “evergreen” content on hand that you can swap out if something goes amiss with a planned piece.
If you're looking for more content ideas and ways to engage your audience, Antidote can help. Our Connect Network of more than 250 nonprofit and patient advocacy partners share dynamic content with their communities every day through Match, our clinical trial search tool. We also help our partners with clinical trial educational materials for their communities. Contact us to learn more.
