A friend of mine works for a small organization with an even smaller marketing budget. She was telling me about putting together a content calendar for 2013 for her tiny but powerful team. When she told me about all of her great ideas, I must admit, I thought, “Why would a small organization want a content calendar? Aren’t those just for well-funded, Fortune 500 marketing organizations and not small bootstrapped organizations like child care centers?”
The more she told me about it the more I realized I was wrong. Content calendars are exactly what small organizations with little resources like centers for child care need to be doing. So let’s start making a content calendar for your child care center!
Step 1 – What’s a Content Calendar?
It’s exactly what it sounds like. A plan to produce marketing material around a calendar. You might also have heard of an editorial calendar. The benefit of this to your child care center is your probably send out newsletters, you might tweet, you might put things on your blog, or newsletter.
The content calendar just sets a framework for you to fit your childcare center’s content into. It’s really just a great tool to keep you from procrastinating on marketing activities.
With the content calendar you can stay on the look out for relevant things and then stock them away until the right time. What do I mean, recipes, news articles, healthy tips
Step 2 – Look at Your Child Care Center’s Calendar and Create Some Buckets
Start your clocks because this will take no more than 2 minutes and don’t worry we’ll work through it together. Of course, I am assuming here you already know who your audience is: new families, prospective families, staff, alumni, etc. For this exercise, let’s say you are sending a newsletter to your childcare center’s current families.
Congratulations! You just created a content calendar! Now that we have taken a first pass, you may want to go back and think about your child care center’s schedules. How does the content calendar square with your program year, open-houses, etc.
Step 3 – Tools for Content Calendars
The best tool is probably going to be your Google Calendar, Outlook calendar, or just a plain, old boring spreadsheet. Take the list we created above, copy it into your spreadsheet or add it to you calendar month by month. A spreadsheet is probably going to work best. Add a couple columns for placeholders. In my content calendar I added a column for the person responsible at the child care center, the format (e.g., child care newsletter) and a notes column (Free content calendar template).
If you need to get more frequent communications with your audiences, you can. Break each on of the months into weeks and put more details into each on of those.
Content calendars need not be restrictive. If something timely comes up like flu vaccinations and young children, feel free to override your calendars plan. Try it out and let me know how it works.
Update: I saw this classroom resource on themes for different months of the year. Take a look and see if it gives you any ideas for building your child cares content calendar
Please comment on whether you would or if you already use a content calendar.
Jeff Holden
Latest posts by Jeff Holden (see all)
- Enhanced Search - 2014/11/05
- Tech Tip: Tamper Proofing Passwords for Child Care Centers - 2013/05/31
- Tech Tips for Everyone (Including Childcare Managers) - 2013/05/30
