2024 Community content calendar template

A solid community engagement plan begins with a strong content strategy. Seamless execution involves a plan to schedule and deploy your content effectively. That is where a community content calendar comes in. Our content calendar template enables you to create a comprehensive content calendar and leverage key dates that matter to your community to drive engagement throughout the year.

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Why you need a community content calendar.

A community content calendar is an essential tool for managing your community content and engaging your community members. It provides a centralized and organized system for planning, scheduling, and tracking your content, encouraging regular posting and creating content that aligns with your community’s interests and needs. For teams of multiple people, a content calendar keeps everyone on the same page and offers a central source of truth for content in your community. 

A content calendar also allows for long-term planning and strategic alignment, enabling you to create content to coincide with important dates, events, or campaign launches, keeping your posts relevant and timely for your members.

Components of your content calendar.

Your content calendar is the scaffolding of your content plan, and includes four core pieces of your content strategy

  • Content objectives for your community
  • Posting frequency
  • Monthly community themes, and 
  • Content post types 
  • Content ideas
  • Assignments
  • Due Dates
  • … and more!

1. Your community’s content objectives

Content objectives are a bridge between your community’s content strategy and the content you create. By matching each piece of content you schedule with your content objectives, you ensure that the content you and your team are creating is in service of your overall strategic plan—and your audience. 

Whether the goal is to increase engagement, drive sales, or educate members, having specific content objectives helps you and your team create useful content that both educates and delights your members and aligns with your strategic goals as a team. 

Community content objective examples 

  • Engage members
  • Educate members 
  • Inspire members
  • Drive interaction

2. Your posting frequency

An important part of the content calendar is answering a straightforward question: How often are you going to post? Regular posting is important for engagement, and a regular cadence helps your members understand what to expect from your community. 

If you’re just getting started, we suggest that you aim to post 1-3 times per week in your community. One high-quality post a week is much more valuable and effective than several rushed posts. Focus on quality over quantity and scale over time in a way that works for your team.

Experiment with days and times for your posts. Tuesdays and Wednesdays tend to get the most engagement on average, but your community could be different! Test out posting times and monitor engagement to see when people are most likely to interact with your content. 

3. Your monthly community content themes

Monthly themes help you build out your calendar by simplifying the content ideation process. By setting a theme for each month, you provide a framework that allows for focused content creation without feeling overwhelmed by endless possibilities. These themes can be tailored specifically to your community, ensuring relevance and resonance with your target audience.

If you have an industry-specific annual calendar, you can align your themes accordingly. However, if you need additional inspiration, our 2024 Holidays Calendar can help kickstart your planning process. 

Content theme examples for each month

  • January: New year, fresh start 
  • February: Celebrating inclusive voices
  • March: Celebrating women 
  • April: Earth Day and sustainability
  • May: Mental Health
  • June: LGBTQ+ Pride 
  • July: Movement and joy
  • August: Back to school prep
  • September: Conference prep 
  • October:  Spooky season 
  • November: Gratitude and giving back 
  • December: Reflection and planning

4. Your community content post types

Diversifying your content post types is crucial to maximize engagement within your community. By aligning your post types with your content objectives and monthly themes, you can frontload much of your ideation work, bringing focus and direction to your content creation strategy. 

To further enhance your content calendar, branding your post types as content properties adds cohesion and excitement to your plan. Not only does this approach simplify content planning, it also provides consistency and a sense of anticipation for your members, leading to greater engagement and an enhanced community experience overall.

Community content post type examples 

Prompt (ask a q!) Ask a question
Poll Post a poll
Member challenge Challenge the community to reach a goal or try something new
AMAs Solicit questions from your members
Study (link to study) Share a new study
Resource Highlight a guide in our resource library
News Share a relevant news story
Tips & tricks Share a relevant tip or trick
Infographics Post an infographic
Image (meme, pic) Share a meme, picture, etc
Link Share an interesting link
Show and tell Invite a member to post
Videos 15 second to 5-minute videos
Member showcase Highlight a member
Motivational quote Share a motivational quote

5. Your content ideas, headlines, assignments, and links

A comprehensive content calendar should not only help you schedule and track content, but also serve as a hub for content ideation and assignments. This feature acts as the central point of the calendar, making it easy for you and your team to brainstorm and record content ideas. In addition to the basic details such as the author, publishing date, and link to the content, you can expand this section to include more information. For example, you might include an editor’s name for each piece, a link to relevant images or multimedia, or even allocate space within the calendar to include the text of the content itself. By incorporating these additional details, your content calendar becomes a comprehensive tool that enables streamlined collaboration, facilitates idea generation, and promotes efficient content creation and publishing processes.

Implementing your community content calendar.

Getting started with your content calendar

Once you have your community content calendar basics, it’s time for the content planning process. Your process is going to be unique to your working style and community, and the best way to figure that out is to dive in.

Keeping in mind your monthly theme, your content objectives, and your post types, start populating your content calendar based on your posting frequency. One strategy is to start with the content objectives to ensure you have a good mix of content to meet your various goals. Then you can think about post types or you can jump to the content idea and decide later what post type you want. Once you’re done with this first round of planning, you will be able to look ahead at the next month and know what days you will be posting, and generally what those posts will try to accomplish. You don’t have to write anything at this stage, no pithy language or perfect prompts. Just notes that give you a starting point when you’re ready to create your content. 

Collaborating with others

For teams with multiple individuals contributing content, a community content calendar becomes even more valuable. One of the key benefits is the ability to assign specific posts or content creation tasks to different team members or even other teams. Each person will know their responsibilities and deadlines, promoting accountability and efficient workflow management. 

Your content calendar can also allow for seamless collaboration by integrating an editing and approval process directly within the calendar. This streamlines the content creation process, eliminates the need for multiple back-and-forth communications, and ensures that the final content meets the desired quality standards.

Iterating your content calendar

Once you start using your content calendar, you’ll see where you can make adjustments. If a certain type of post gets good engagement, lean into that! If another type of post consistently gets no engagement, swap that post type out for another one. You may find that some posts that you expected to meet one objective (educating your member,  for example) actually meet another one (drive interaction, for example).

Download Hivebrite’s free community content calendar template

We have created a 2024 content calendar template designed to help you create an actionable plan for consistent and engaging content for your members. The key to our calendar is timely inspiration—we’ve compiled over 1300 holidays, observances, and events to  inspire your content as you build out your content calendar for 2024. The 2024 Hivebrite Holidays Calendar is  filterable including officially-recognized days such as federal and bank holidays, religious holidays, and UN, WHO, and CDC holidays and unofficial days including food holidays and other celebrations. We’ve also included big events for 2024, including the Olympics, awards ceremony dates, and more.