It’s the most wonderful time of the year. The holidays are in full swing, and if you are like me you love the smell of pine in the air. Evergreens are our favorite trees at the LightBox Collaborative, because no matter when, you know what you are getting with an evergreen, and you know that it will be there for you year after year.
So in that spirit, we offer you a new version of our beloved Editorial Calendar: The Evergreen. Rather than tying this one to the specific dates of 2017, we have included the events that happen every year in the same months, so that you can keep using this version in perpetuity.
We think this is an improvement as you now have a version of the calendar you will never have to wait for! We also understand this is a change to a resource that many of you have come to rely on, but we hope you can understand why this change makes sense. At LightBox Collaborative, we pride ourselves on knowing when we are the best team for the job, and when we aren’t.
In this case, there are a lot of smart folks doing better work on this than we are. Kivi Leroux Miller of NonprofitMarketingGuide.com offers tons of great editorial calendar resources, including a book of templates and monthly content ideas.
If you are looking for ways to find anniversaries and hooks, we can recommend a few out of many great resources:
- Library of Congress’ Today in History, https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history;
- ITN Source’s Anniversaries & Events Calendar, http://www.itnsource.com/fr/specials/anniversaries;
- History Channel’s This Day in History, http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history;
- For anniversaries specific to civil liberties, check out Today in Civil Liberties History, http://todayinclh.com/
- And for those of you still into paper, there is always the Slingshot Organizer: https://slingshot.tao.ca/?page_id=115027 and the Chase Calendar of Events: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781598888584/Chases-Calendar-of-Events-2017-The-Ultimate-Go-To-Guide-for-Special-Days-Weeks-and-Months-60th-Edition#
And naturally, Google is always there for you. To find hooks that are more relevant to your work, do searches like “2017 anniversary refugee,” which I used to find that next year will mark the 50th anniversary of an important milestone in international law governing refugees, and “2017 anniversary LGBTQ” led me to this handy Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LGBT_awareness_days.
Every year we wrestle with questions on what content to include in our template calendar, as our clients work on so many different issues. Rather than choosing for you, we think it’s more strategic to give you a evergreen template, some starter ideas, and some resources to make this your own from year to year.
So this is our last Editorial Calendar. But it shouldn’t be YOUR last editorial calendar. It is an evergreen, and like the trees, it will keep delivering for you month after month, year after year – as long as you give it the proper amount of love and attention.
Photo courtesy of flickr user rzepak.
…
LightBox Collaborative Senior Partner Amanda Cooper hopes to spend some time hiking through the redwoods over the holidays.