More to the point, will your audiences miss you if you don’t show up in their email, Insta feed, or mailbox?
Probably not.
I’m sure you didn’t notice that I’ve been sending this e-letter maybe once a month instead of every other Thursday as I promised. You have more important things to think about, like whether we’ll ever see season 4 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
Similarly, your subscribers, donors, volunteers, program participants, patrons, and clients will not notice if you don’t show up in your usual communications channels. They’ll just forget about you.
- When they need what you offer, they will turn to someone who offers the same thing and was in touch with them yesterday.
- When they have something to offer you, like money or time, they may give it to someone else who has repeatedly shown them how their money and time make a difference.
You want to be at the top of people’s mind. To get there, you need to communicate regularly.
I know, you’re busy. Getting the newsletter out or the photo posted never seems like the most important thing you have to do right now.
So the communications get shunted aside until it’s four weeks later and you still haven’t written your e-letter. (I speak from experience.)
What to do? Well, there are all sorts of self-help blogs that will tell you how to set goals, plan to achieve them, develop self-discipline, and the like. Since this is a communications blog, my recommendation is an editorial calendar.
The essence of an editorial calendar is a list of publication dates paired to tentative content ideas – “tentative” because you want flexibility to respond to breaking news or an unexpected need.
If you are an organization of more than one, you may need additional columns: “Date” and “Who” columns for content development, approval, and publication/delivery, for example.
If the communication campaign is complex, such as a multi-channel donor solicitation that starts with a print newsletter and ends with a last-chance email, you’ll need a separate spreadsheet, cross-referenced to the master editorial calendar.
I’ve set aside an hour tomorrow morning to plan my own editorial calendar for the next four months. (I figure that’s as far out as I can go before the world changes again.)
When will you start/revive/refine yours?