Editorial calendar template

Your company’s content is essential to connecting with customers. Whether it’s a blog post that positions you as an industry leader, a newsletter that lets customers know what’s coming next, or a social post that helps you connect with your target audience, a strong editorial strategy is key to building relationships. 

But tracking your upcoming content is often easier said than done. Between ideating different types of content, producing assets for multiple channels, and coordinating work across teams, a lot goes into running a successful content strategy. 

That’s where Asana’s editorial calendar template can help. Our template is a reusable calendar you can use to track all the blog posts, articles, videos, and assets you produce. By laying out each step—from ideation to publication—and providing a visual space for cross-team collaboration, our editorial calendar template simplifies content management.

What is an editorial calendar?

An editorial calendar—also known as a content calendar—is a schedule of all the blog posts, articles, videos, or other content initiatives your company plans to publish. An editorial calendar typically includes specific details for each piece of content, such as the channel you’re posting on and go-live date. 

By providing an overview of upcoming content, editorial calendars make it easy for you to manage your editorial strategy. With an outline of what content is coming next, you can ensure you have a mix of evergreen and timely pieces in the pipeline, and plan for upcoming holidays and events. Plus, since editorial calendars include task due dates and assignees, they keep content production on track so you know you’ll hit publication deadlines. 

What is an editorial calendar template?

Asana’s editorial calendar template is a duplicatable framework where you can plan and track your content. By providing visibility into what posts are coming up, our editorial calendar simplifies the organizing, planning, scheduling, and publishing of content. In the template, you can use optional custom tags to track essential information for each post, including:

• The due date for the post and corresponding assets

• The primary channel

• The content status (for example, “not started,” “in review,” or “ready to publish”)

• The content type

• The approval status 

• The publish date

Benefits of using Asana’s editorial calendar template

Asana’s editorial calendar template makes it easy to plan out upcoming content. With our template, you can:

• Manage all your content in one place, so you don’t have to dig through emails, spreadsheets, or docs to know what’s going live and when.

• Simplify cross-functional collaboration by bringing together your social media, PR, and marketing teams in one place. 

• Assign tasks for each step of content production, including drafting, editing, approving, and publishing.

• Set deadlines for every task to create a workback schedule that you can visualize in Calendar View. 

• Easily track content status through every production phase, so you can see where everything stands at a glance.

• Give your team members clarity on the latest content changes by sharing feedback directly in calendar tasks.

• Quickly shift due dates and deadlines as needs and timing change. 

• Organize all your assets where you work with integrated apps like those from Google Workplace and Dropbox. 

• Use custom fields to organize and color code essential task information, like status, channel, and content type. 

• Track new ideas for posts and keep an eye on your publishing schedule to ensure you always have enough content in the pipeline. 

Examples of calendars you can create with Asana’s templates

Our basic editorial calendar template can serve as the foundation for various content calendars. Here are a few examples of calendars you can create using our templates as a jumping-off point: 

• Primary content calendars: Visualize all upcoming content, from blog posts to newsletters and email blasts, in one central content calendar.

• Blog calendars: Use our editorial calendar template to create a content calendar specific to blog posts. Enable custom tags to quickly visualize the categories each post aligns with and collaborate with your writing and design team in one place. 

• Video production calendars: Create a video production calendar to track your video content from brainstorming to completion. Map out your video’s progress using custom fields that align with each stage of production, including scripting, editing, and promotion. Plus, keep all video assets, like file URLs and scripts, in one place.

• Email marketing calendars: Use our email marketing calendar template to organize and streamline your marketing email workflow.

• Social media content calendars: Create a social media calendar template to manage upcoming social media posts across all social channels. 

Integrated features and recommended apps for your editorial calendar template

Consolidate your tech stack and simplify collaboration with integrated features and apps that reduce app switching.

Integrated features

1. Calendar View. Calendar View is a project view where you can see all upcoming and past work in a calendar format. Clearly track what’s getting done and what deadlines are coming up. Give your stakeholders insight into every task’s individual due date, as well as the larger cadence of scheduled project work. Then, click into a task to view more information like the associated custom fields, dependencies, subtasks, and more.

2. Subtasks. Sometimes a to-do is too big to capture in one task. If a task has more than one contributor, a broad due date, or stakeholders that need to review and approve before it can go live, subtasks can help. Subtasks are a powerful way to distribute work and split tasks into individual components—while keeping the small to-dos connected to the overarching context of the parent task. Break tasks into smaller components or capture the individual components of a multi-step process with subtasks. 

3. Custom fields. Custom fields are the best way to tag, sort, and filter work. Create unique custom fields for any information you need to track—from priority and status to email or phone number. Use custom fields to sort and schedule your to-dos so you know what to work on first. Plus, share custom fields across tasks and projects to ensure consistency across your organization. 

4. Adding tasks to multiple projects. The nature of work is cross-functional. Teams need to be able to work effectively across departments. But if each department has their own filing system, work gets stalled and siloed. Asana makes it easy to track and manage tasks across multiple projects. This doesn't just reduce duplicative work and increase cross-team visibility. It also helps your team see tasks in context, view who’s working on what, and keep your team and tasks connected.

Recommended apps

1. Slack. Turn ideas, work requests, and action items from Slack into trackable tasks and comments in Asana. Go from quick questions and action items to tasks with assignees and due dates. Easily capture work so requests and to-dos don’t get lost in Slack. 

2. Google Workplace. Attach files directly to tasks in Asana with the Google Workplace file chooser, which is built into the Asana task pane. Easily attach any My Drive file with just a few clicks.

3. Gmail. With the Asana for Gmail integration, you can create Asana tasks directly from your Gmail inbox. Any tasks you create from Gmail will automatically include the context from your email, so you never miss a beat. Need to refer to an Asana task while composing an email? Instead of opening Asana, use the Asana for Gmail add-on to simply search for that task directly from your Gmail inbox. 

4. Outlook. As action items come in via email, like reviewing work from your agency or a request for design assets from a partner, you can now create tasks for them in Asana right from Outlook. You can then assign the new task to yourself or a teammate, set a due date, and add it to a project so it’s connected to other relevant work. 

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