Planning, editorial calendar & briefs
How this is scored
Turning a content strategy into scheduled work: topics and campaigns, an editorial calendar across channels, briefs that carry the goal, audience and keywords to the writer, and a view of what is due, late or missing.
0 — No planning features; content is created as standalone entries with no calendar, status or owner.
3 — A shared calendar with publish dates and simple statuses, but no briefs, no campaigns or topics to group work under, and no notion of who owns a piece.
5 — An editorial calendar across channels with owners, due dates and custom statuses, briefs attached to each piece, and content grouped by campaign or topic cluster.
8 — Strategy is connected to the plan: topics or personas defined once and assigned to pieces, configurable workflows per content type, workload and deadline views per person, and recurring formats scheduled as series.
10 — The plan is accountable: every published piece traces back to its brief, topic and campaign, gaps in coverage per topic or funnel stage are reported, and plan-versus-published is visible over time without a spreadsheet.
The Web Engineer
Strategy is wired into the plan, which is what I want to see: personas built from interview data, story ideas ranked by reader signal, campaign centers with cross-line-of-business tagging, one cross-channel calendar with a live capacity heatmap, and brief intake that routes to pod, reviewer and jurisdiction. Custom workflow steps can carry a contributor, due date and price; I found no public information on recurring formats scheduled as series or a plan-versus-published view over time. 4 5 7 8