You built your Q2 calendar in January. It was clean and perfectly paced.
Then the news broke. And suddenly, that volunteer impact update feels like it landed from another planet.
The world is kind of always on fire now, and your calendar has to account for that.
But it doesn’t have to be rocket science.
Why static calendars break
Most content calendars assume stability.
They’re built week by week with specific sends on specific days, and when something breaks, the whole thing gets scrambled.
A better approach I’ve adapted to is separating what can’t move from what can.
Some content is anchored. Giving Tuesday, year-end, your monthly giving drive in March, welcome series, receipts.
These stretches have real deadlines and real revenue attached. They don’t get scrapped lightly.
Everything else should be movable. Cultivation touches, event promos, impact stories — give these a window, not a hard date.
Build some slack into your calendar so when something breaks, you have room to respond without blowing up the whole plan.
What this looks like in practice
A crisis doesn’t always mean scrapping your planned campaign. Sometimes it means reframing it.
When Hurricane Beryl hit Houston five days before the Houston Food Bank’s planned 713 Day campaign in 2024, the team faced that exact choice.
They worked with RKD Group to pivot their messaging to meet the moment, kept the launch date, and ended up raising 429% over their original fundraising goal.
Your monthly giving push doesn’t have to disappear because the news cycle shifted. It might land harder if the framing reflects why sustained support matters right now.
Your year-end appeals that land during a federal funding crisis? It’s a chance to make the case for why private support matters more than ever.
Knowing what can move is the first step.
The second is having a plan for how you’ll decide in the moment — and that shouldn’t happen in a panicked Slack thread at the last possible moment.
I’ve written before about a 72-hour gut check when hard news breaks and building rapid-response systems before the crisis hits.
The bottom line
The dates on your calendar aren’t the problem.
It’s the assumption that everything has to go out exactly as planned.
Give yourself room to move, and when the moment calls for it, get creative with what stays.
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Quick hits
Email on Acid put together a fun timeline of email history, from MIT’s first mail command in 1965 to new bulk-sender requirements across email providers.
Doing Good Digital explains why image-heavy emails tank your deliverability — spam filters can’t read text baked into a JPEG, and if images are blocked, your supporters see nothing.
The Statue of Liberty & Ellis Island Foundation is hiring a Director of Marketing to lead digital strategy, including email marketing and donor engagement, for two of the most iconic sites in the country. Hybrid, NYC, $125K–$140K.
‘Til next time!
Sara