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 Head of Content
The briefs are real: topic, story and piece cards carry audience, personas, strategic guidelines, deadlines, budget and working teams, and can be shared with agencies, while strategy-level topics and the editorial and topic conference stages turn ideas into stories for scheduled work. What I cannot find is the calendar discipline I run on — per-person workload and deadline views, visibility of what is late, and recurring formats — so I stop between the mid and high anchors. 5 6 1 2