How We Built the Ultimate Content Calendar in Notion

Ah, yes - it’s a struggle as old as time… where do I build the ultimate content calendar? 🤔The community team at Talkbase has lots of experience creating and maintaining content calendars. We unanimously agree that adapting to a tool most people already use is a good place to start, and that’s how I ended up falling in love with 📆 Notion’s calendar feature. Let me tell you more about it!

I’m pretty new to Notion, but I’ve got to say: what an easy tool to use! 🙌 We use it at Talkbase to create internal pages, external pages, organize our sprints, document internal processes, plan our roadmap, and lots more. It’s so easy to use, and it also comes with Notion’s awesome guides and templates to get started. 👏 They get a 10/10 for usability and for having a great library of self-serve resources.

We were already using the calendar feature, which is a database that you can change views on. Our first mistake: overthinking it! Initially we just had way too many fields to fill out for each piece of content. Here are the edited and scaled down properties we kept in our content calendar:

• Content Title: The article or event title, or the name of the program we are promoting.
• Post Date: The day the content gets posted, or the date the promotion is posted for an upcoming event.
• Content Type: Is it a social post, email, podcast, blog, or product update? Those are our categories, but you could easily customize this for your needs.
• Location: Shows where the content is going to be posted. It could be our website, Slack community, social channels, or an online meeting platform like Zoom.
• Content Link(s): We have this property captured so it’s very easy for our other teammates to see if/where something has already been posted.
• Person Responsible: Pretty self explanatory, but I do want to note that this person will not be notified unless you schedule a reminder alarm.

One of the other cool things about Notion’s calendar feature is that you can choose which properties to display. For our purposes, for example, we only want to see the Content Title, Content Type, Location, and Person Responsible. This keeps our view clean and makes it easy to see what’s coming up:

Now if someone clicks on one of those items, say, the Blog item in the top right, they will see the whole view with all the fields, and a place to upload copy, images, or whatever tasks you need to collaborate on with your team:

And lastly, here is a screenshot of one of the emails after setting the reminder alarm. This has been life-changing for us, since it pops right into our inbox on the morning we are scheduled to make a post: 

To summarize, the Notion calendar works perfectly for our team for the following reasons:

1. It can display only the necessary info in the calendar view
2. Filters allow the calendar view to be narrowed down 
3. Has space to hold copy and images
4. Has the ability to send notifications
5. Easy to duplicate and maintain

We will keep our readers posted if we figure out any other interesting tips & tricks while using the Notion calendar feature. We love to save people time and give an inside look on the tools community builders are using. I guess we wouldn’t be community operations nerds, otherwise! Come back for new content soon, or join the Talkbase Friends Community for more amazing content and discussions with our members. We hope to see you around soon!