It’s Sunday night and you’re trying to remember what you promised your members this month. The workshop idea is in a notes app. The Canva graphic is somewhere in your downloads. The goal you set at the start of the year is on a sticky note that fell behind the desk.
Everything exists. None of it is in one place.
A Trello content calendar template fixes that by putting your goals, your ideas, and your actual posts on one visual board you’ll open every day. Here’s how I set mine up, column by column, so you can plan a year of community content without losing the plot by March.
What Makes a Trello Content Calendar Template Worth Using?
A good one plans more than posts. It holds your yearly goals, quarterly priorities, monthly themes, and loose ideas on one board, so every post traces back to something you’re working toward.
I’ve used Trello for at least a decade, and it’s still my first stop for any kind of planning. I’m a visual planner, and seeing the whole year laid out in columns is what keeps me using it when other tools get abandoned.
Most content calendars are a list of dates with posts attached. That tells you what’s going out Tuesday. It doesn’t tell you why.
This board works top down instead. Goals first, then the quarter, then the month, then the post. When you sit down to write, you already know what the content is supposed to do. If you want the board itself, it lives in the free resources hub.
How Should You Set Up the Board Before You Plan Anything?
Start with the columns that support the planning: a getting-started column if Trello is new to you, Quick Grabs for the things you reach for constantly, and a brain dump for ideas without a date.
New to Trello
If you’re opening Trello for the first time and already feel overwhelmed, start here. It holds Trello’s own videos and guides, plus a walkthrough of this board.
- Watch the how-to-use-this-board video before you move anything
- Skim Trello’s guides for the basics: cards, lists, and labels
- Delete the column once you’re comfortable
Quick Grabs
This is the column I’d miss most. It’s for anything you open over and over.
What that looks like:
- Paste in the link to the Canva template you use for community graphics. Trello shows a preview right on the card, so you click it and start designing.
- Keep a Priority card and a Goal card here, so you can copy them anywhere on the board
- Store the Canva template for the color-coded tabs if you want to swap in your brand colors
If you reach for something more than once a week, it belongs in Quick Grabs.
Brain Dump
Everything that wakes you up in the middle of the night. Big ideas, small ideas, the thing you want to try someday but can’t schedule yet.
- Drop it in as a card the moment it shows up
- Don’t organize it here
- Pull cards into a month when they’re ready
Nothing in the brain dump is a commitment. That’s what makes it useful.
How Do You Turn Yearly Goals Into Community Content?
Put your yearly goals on the board first, break each one into dated steps on the card, then move each quarter’s goals into their own column so that month’s content can serve them.
Start with the yearly goal overview
Before any content, do a little vision planning. What do you want to launch this year, and when? Goals can be big (launch a course, open a community) or measurable, like increasing podcast listens by 20 percent by the end of the year.
For the bigger version of this exercise, I walk through vision planning for your online community on its own.
Break each goal into steps
Open the goal card and add the mini goals that get you there. For that 20 percent podcast goal, the steps might be:
- Survey members inside the community
- Send an email blast
- Reach out to the community directly
Give each step a due date. If you’re more than a team of one, assign each step to the person doing it. At that point the board is planning your business, not only your content.
Move the quarter into focus
As each quarter starts, move its goals and priorities into the current-quarter column. I chunk it this way so I’m only looking at what’s in front of me, not the whole year at once.
That one move keeps the overwhelm down. You see this quarter’s priorities, the goals behind them, and the month’s content in one snapshot, and you can check that the content actually speaks to them.
What Goes on Each Monthly Content Card?
Each month gets a column, an optional theme, and a card per post. Every card carries a cover image, a description holding the content itself, and a due date for when it goes live.
The template includes a sample month so you can see how it fits together. Delete it once you’ve got the idea.
Set a theme (or don’t)
I like giving each month a theme, like vision planning, so the content has a thread running through it. You don’t have to. Delete the theme card if it doesn’t help.
The theme colors match the quarter colors on the board. It’s a small thing, but it tells me at a glance which quarter a month belongs to and keeps me on task.
Build the card
Each post card is simple:
- Cover image: the graphic you’ll use in Circle, on Instagram, in email, wherever it’s going. Attach it right to the card.
- Description: the content itself. A Circle post, notes for a podcast episode, a list of survey questions. All of it lives here.
- Due date: the day it publishes or goes live.
That due date matters more than it looks, because it’s what powers the calendar view if you upgrade later. For the rhythm of posts and events around it, my breakdown of a content calendar for your community covers batching and scheduling.
Do You Need a Paid Trello Account for This Template?
No. The template works on a free Trello account. A paid plan adds calendar, timeline, and dashboard views, plus custom fields, which are useful but not required.
Calendar, timeline, and dashboard views
On a paid account you see the same cards laid out differently. The calendar view shows what’s going out when, pulled from those due dates. It’s one of the things that keeps me paying for Trello.
Custom fields
The template comes with two dropdown custom fields built in:
- Location: list your spaces inside Circle, so every card says where it’s posting
- Event type: starts with content and event, and you can add your own
To change them, open Custom Fields on a card, pick the field, and rename, add, or delete options. You can remove a field entirely if you don’t need it.
On a free account, put that same information in the card description. It works fine. It’s just less tidy.
Try This Prompt
If you’ve got your goals but not the steps or the themes, this turns them into cards you can drop straight onto the board.
“I run a [type of community] for [who]. My goals for this year are [list two to four goals, with numbers and deadlines where you have them]. Using a board with a yearly goal overview, quarterly priority columns, and monthly theme columns, break each goal into three to five dated steps, assign each goal to a quarter, and suggest a monthly theme for each month that supports that quarter’s goal. Give it back to me as a list organized by quarter, with each goal, its steps and due dates, and the three monthly themes under it.”
It drafts the structure. You decide which goals are actually worth the year.
Plan the Year, Then Plan the Post
The point of a template like this isn’t the columns. It’s that your content stops being a separate job from your goals.
When the goal, the quarter, and the post sit on the same board, you stop writing content because it’s Tuesday and start writing it because it moves something forward. Less scramble. Fewer abandoned calendars.
Set up the board once, move the quarter over when it turns, and let the brain dump hold the rest until it’s ready.
Watch the Video
New videos go up every Thursday on Your Community Strategist.
Watch This One
More like it on Your Community Strategist, new every Thursday.
More Like This
Watch: The Art of Vision Planning. The goal-setting step that should happen before a single card goes on this board.
Listen: How to Create Engaging Content for Your Online Community. What to actually put in the description field once the dates are mapped.
Listen: Building a 90-Day Action Plan to Reach Your Goals. The quarterly column, turned into a plan you can work week by week.
Keep Going
If you want the board without building it from scratch, the Trello template is waiting in the free resources, and coCreator Society is where you work through the planning with people doing the same thing.
coCreator Society is where community builders and membership founders work through this together, with the templates, the walkthroughs, and people who are one step ahead of you. Join coCreator Society
If you would rather not do this part alone, Rachel and the team build, migrate, and run communities for founders who need it done properly the first time. Talk to the team
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