The Essential Editorial Calendar for Schools [Free Template]

We’ve been lucky to see amazing success here at Cursive Content Marketing over the past three years.

There’s a lot that goes into this – hard work, knowledge, business smarts, the unending desire to learn and grow and help—but without a doubt, Cursive’s success could not have been realized without this blog.

Blogging gives us a platform to share our ideas and philosophies. It helps clients understand who we are, what we do, and how we think before establishing a real-life relationship with us. It’s given us opportunities to speak at events, be featured on podcasts and to work with some amazing schools.

All of those incredible achievements because of a blog. And the big secret behind why the blog has been so successful? We’ve been devoted to our editorial calendar since the beginning.

You might be thinking: That’s the big secret? An editorial calendar?

Yes. An editorial calendar. And here’s why.

A school blog editorial calendar provides one central place to:

Plan topics & assets

Mapping out your posts in a calendar view allows you to visualize your plan in action. At Cursive, we color-code our posts based on categories, which allows us to ensure that we regularly create a mix of content on various topics.

An editorial calendar also allows you to plan the assets you will need to support a blog post. You can note if you need photos and graphics, or if there is a content upgrade planned to go along with the post.

Divide workload

Blogging is a commitment, and it can be easy to get burned out. An editorial calendar allows you to divide the work required for each post across your team, so no one person is responsible for doing too much at once.

When you have an understanding of the workload required to fulfill everything that is outlined in your editorial calendar, you also have a better idea of if you need to hire or outsource the work that needs to be done.

Track results

By logging the results of each post, you gain a better idea of what works and what doesn’t. Analytics can help inform future blog posts, spark new ideas and provide you with a better understanding of how successful your blog is.

Organize ideas

Have you ever had a brilliant idea for a blog post, jotted it down on a scrap piece of paper, and promptly forget where you put that piece of paper…or even that you had the idea in the first place?

Ahem. ::sheepishly raises hand::

Which is exactly why we started using our editorial calendar to track our content ideas, too. Now, we never run out of blog post ideas and can even use each other’s ideas as a springboard to gain inspiration for even more posts.

Think ahead

Blog content can be used to support a variety of events and initiatives, and with an editorial calendar those events will never sneak up on you. Plug them in at the beginning of the year to give yourself appropriate lead time to brainstorm, create and publish.

Want to write a series of posts that tie together? That’s so much easier to do when you have a place to map it out.

If you’ve ever found yourself completely disorganized, rushing to create content, frustrated by not being able to see the big picture, or overwhelmed by the workload your blog adds, you need an editorial calendar.

We are so passionate about how effective they are that we decided to share the exact editorial calendar template we’ve spent years perfecting. Ready to get started? Download our FREE Editorial Calendar template from our Resource Library.