How to Create an Internal Email Editorial Calendar for Your Comms Team

What is calendar management?

Whether you’re just getting started or looking to level up your internal email management game, this guide covers how to create an internal email editorial calendar to help your team stay organized and your people engaged.

Calendar management is an essential aspect of organizing workflows and aligning team efforts. Specifically, it encompasses the process of planning, scheduling, and coordinating activities across various projects and departments to ensure that objectives are met efficiently.

This practice is particularly crucial for internal communications teams, where timely and relevant messaging can significantly impact employee engagement and organizational harmony. By mastering calendar management, teams can streamline their operations, avoid scheduling conflicts, and enhance overall productivity.

What is an email editorial calendar?

An internal email editorial or content calendar is a shared calendar that outlines what internal emails are being sent, to whom, when, and why. As a single source of truth, it can help you plan and prioritize email content, alert you of competing sends, optimize timing, and help you track your performance, all while making it easier to collaborate within your team (and across departments).

Additionally, it can also help prevent email overload – so your team doesn’t accidentally send five emails to the same group of employees in one week (unless it’s benefits season, or something exciting is happening).

Why do you need an email calendar?

Depending on your organization’s size, you may have a lot of cooks in the internal comms kitchen: HR, IT, Operations, and leadership may all have messages to share. Employees can only handle so much email, and repetitive messages from multiple senders is a primary cause for feeling email overload. Without a shared calendar, emails can quickly become repetitive, poorly timed, and unmanageable.

An editorial calendar can make it easier for your team to boost visibility of your internal comms efforts, collaborate with other departments, space out communications, and ultimately, create a better employee experience.

What is email and calendar management?

Internal email and calendar management can keep your messaging clear, consistent, and optimized when done well. When you do it right, you send the right amount of information to the right people at the right time. This strategy involves prioritizing messaging, scheduling and spacing sends, and tracking deadlines. The goal is to organize your internal comms so your team can work efficiently and avoid overload.

Managing internal comms with a visual calendar system can help simplify your workflow. Remember to include senders who are not part of your internal comms team—HR and IT tend to send a lot of broadcast emails.

How to Create an Internal Email Editorial Calendar

1. Pick your format.

We’re biased, but PoliteMail’s Calendar View for scheduled sends is a valuable tool for email calendar management, making it easy to see what messages your team plans to send. (The Calendar View is available to all roles in PoliteMail, so any PoliteMail user can see scheduled messages and plan accordingly.) In the Calendar View, messages are color-coded: gray events are not yet Scheduled Sends but “penciled in” time slots for a future message, and blue events are Scheduled Sends with an associated message.

While they may not be the most specialized tools for the job, alternatives to PoliteMail’s Calendar View are a shared Outlook calendar, Excel or Word document, or another project management tool. All have pros and cons, so choose what makes sense for your team and the tools you already use. Limitations to watch for include minimal content planning features, poor collaboration functions, and visual limitations.

2. Define email categories.

Next, you’ll want to assess your email content and create typical buckets like announcements, culture, events, HR/benefits, IT, and leadership comms. These standardized buckets can help you categorize and prioritize your messaging, quickly identify any imbalances in the types of messaging you’re sending, and assess the effectiveness of each category.

3. Map your audience.

You’ll want to divide your all-employee email list into smaller target audiences based on specific criteria or characteristics. Data from PoliteMail, which includes four billion emails sent to 12 million global employees, shows that attention and readership decrease as the distribution list size increases. Organizations commonly segment lists based on hierarchy (staff, management, and leadership), units (divisions, departments, and brands), geographic location (region, country, city), and categorically, such as benefits enrollment (declined, not enrolled, enrolled, or experiencing a qualifying life event).

4. Determine send frequency.

Next, you’ll want to identify recurring sends. What do you send weekly? Monthly? Quarterly? You can slot these recurring messages into your email calendar and plan other messages around them. Prioritize this consistency while leaving room for flexibility. By leaving space between scheduled sends, you can minimize the risk of overlapping messages if leadership needs to send a time-sensitive, yet unexpected message.

5. Build in time for editing—and communicate expectations.

As internal comms professionals, you’re already familiar with the time it takes to craft and edit a message. But when you share your editorial email calendar with other teams, like IT or leadership, it can be helpful to make that timeline visible to them. Communicate your draft deadlines, when feedback is due, and final scheduling. Or consider noting minimum lead times. For example, content must be submitted to your team for review at least seven days in advance. These timelines can allow space for thoughtful, well-reviewed messages.

6. Measure and adjust.

When you create an internal email editorial calendar, you want to maximize your impact and minimize overload by using your time and resources efficiently. Evaluate your approach, benchmark your performance, and refine your email management strategy to improve overall effectiveness. Review read and engagement rates, and analyze employee feedback. Your calendar should evolve with your team.

Simplifying internal comms with an email editorial calendar

A thoughtful and visual internal email editorial calendar isn’t just about logistics; it can help your team produce more intentional, strategic messages. When you plan, it’s easier to loop in other departments, engage your people, and keep those all-staff emails from disappearing into the digital void. An email unread is a message unsaid.