Every team has its own formula for creating high-quality content—and no one knows your process better than you. With Airtable, you can stay on top of every piece of content in your pipeline, from idea to delivery.
In this guide, you’ll learn step-by-step how to track your team’s content production in Airtable. Follow along to customize your content calendar template for your specific needs.
You’ll learn how to:
① Define your content process with a calendar that fits the way you work
② Organize your content at every step of production
③ Visualize your pipeline and capture real-time insights
Define your process
Keeping tabs on the status of each piece of content can be a job unto itself. With a clearly defined production process anchored in stages that everyone can rally around, you can ensure your team stays on track and on time at every step.
Get started by building your team’s production process into your new content calendar base. A base—short for "database"—contains all of the information you need for your workflow. For you, that’s this content calendar!
Bases are organized into tables, which contain a list of items of the same type—like a list of content pieces, a list of campaigns, or a list of your teammates.
→ To start tracking your content, focus in on the Content pipeline table by navigating to it in the top left corner of your base.
1. Add your content to start making this template your own
Each piece of content that you’re tracking is stored in a record, or an individual entry in your table. The title of each piece is captured in the first field, and additional fields hold important details such as key dates, status, or channel.
If you aren’t quite ready to add your content here, no problem—this template includes examples for you to get started with.
→ If you’d like to add your own, go ahead and add one or more content titles in this table’s first field. To add your content, you can double-click to rename or copy and paste a list of names directly into your table.
2. Tag each piece of content with a status
From planning to published, make sure it’s clear where each piece of content stands by giving it a status.
→ Navigate to the Status field and choose from the dropdown options to tag your content with a status such as Production, Editing, or Live.
As each piece of content moves forward in your pipeline, you or your teammates can adjust by opening the dropdown and selecting the latest status.
3. Customize the status field to fit the way your team works
Your template comes with pre-populated statuses to help you get started. You can adjust your pipeline to match your team’s real-life process by customizing the single select Status field.
→ To customize your status field, click on the dropdown arrow in the field header, then select the Customize field type option. Add a new option by selecting “Add an option” at the bottom of the list, or rename an existing status option by selecting it.
You can also drag and drop to change the order of each step or set a custom color for each option by selecting the colored icon to the left of the option name.
Organize your content
Now that you’ve added your content to your content pipeline, you can start organizing your content to fit your team’s needs. With Airtable’s views, you can visualize the same list of content in different ways.
You can create and save as many views as you’d like in a given table, and then navigate between them to see your information from a new perspective. Changes you make to any record will automatically update every view in your table.
→ To start exploring the pre-built views in your template, navigate to the view icon in the top left corner of your Content pipeline table. This view sidebar helps you navigate all of the views in a table, and when it’s open, you’ll see a number of views ready for you to explore.
1. Drag and drop to move content through your pipeline
Visualize your content across every stage of production with Kanban view—open your Production pipeline view to see your content stacked by status.
→ To make status updates, simply drag and drop content cards through your pipeline. Moving a record between stacks will update its status across all views in this table.
2. Get a quick visual by color-coding your calendar
Delivering on deadlines just got easier using calendar view. Navigate to the Deadlines calendar view to see your most important dates—and drag and drop to keep them up to date everywhere in your table.
Customize your calendar by coloring each content piece based on conditions you specify. Try coloring records the same as status—you’ll be able to quickly discern what content is on track and what needs your attention.
→ To color your content by status, select Color in the top of your table and then choose “Select field” from the dropdown.
3. Customize any view to see what you want to see
The views in your template are just a starting point—as you decide what views make the most sense for your workflow, you can customize any view to fit your needs. And you can create a new view anytime you want to!
→ To customize any view, just navigate to the view bar and adjust the settings. Try customizing the All content view by adjusting the Sort, Group, and Filter view bar options.
With Sort, you can sort your content in an order of your choosing. To sort, select the Sort button, then select the field you’d like to sort by in the dropdown, such as Due date.
With Group, you can view your records grouped together based on a field of your choosing. Select the Group button, and then pick a field to group by, such as Status.
With Filter, you can drill down in any view to see just a subset of your pipeline. For example, you might want to filter out content that’s already live, or focus on content in a specific channel.
Visualize your pipeline
Now that you’ve organized the pieces in your content pipeline, it’s time to zoom out and see a high-level view. You can get real-time insights into your pipeline with apps, mini-applications that you can add onto your content calendar to extend its capabilities.
There are dozens of apps to choose from to help visualize, analyze, and take action on your content—and your template has a few pre-configured apps to get you started.
→ To start exploring apps, expand your apps dashboard by selecting the Apps icon in the upper right corner. From here, you can expand any app to take a closer look, and add, remove, drag, drop, and resize to create dashboards that fit your team’s exact needs.
1. Spin up quick insights with chart app
Chart app allows you to visualize your content on a real-time, interactive chart, choosing from one of several chart types: bar, line, scatter, pie, or donut.
Take a look at the Pipeline by status chart app in your template. This chart gives you a visual count of how much content is in each stage of your production. As your content moves from one status to another, you’ll see the chart automatically update. You can also drill down into the content in each stage by clicking on one of the bars.
→ To adjust how your chart looks, click the gear icon in the top right corner to open the settings. Explore your content from a new angle by adjusting the x-axis, or group by another field in your table.
2. Adjust campaign timelines with Gantt app
With Gantt app, you can visualize a schedule of related activities over time, like campaigns and content.
Check out the Campaign timelines Gantt app in your template. This app uses your content start date and end date, and visualizes the duration, position, and overlap of each on an interactive timeline. Make the information in your Gantt app easier to see by going fullscreen—to expand, select the fullscreen button in the top right corner of the app.
→ To customize how your Gantt app looks and behaves, open the settings in the top right corner. Color by status to understand campaign health at a glance, then drag a range to reschedule your content’s key dates. Changes you make here will automatically update the content in your pipeline table.
3. See and update multiple dimensions with matrix app
For each asset in your pipeline, there are lot of details to stay on top of, from status to channel. With matrix app, you can explore multiple dimensions at the same time on a dynamic 2-d grid.
Expand the Pipeline by channel matrix app in your template to explore how your content is distributed across channel and status.
→ Open the settings to adjust which fields are displayed—then drag and drop a content piece to update two dimensions at the same time.
Nice work!
You’ve taken three key steps to track your team’s content in Airtable:
✓ First, you customized your template by adding in your team’s content, capturing key details like each piece’s status.
✓ Next, you organized your content across different views, from kanban to calendar view, then customized each view to fit your needs.
✓ Finally, you visualized your team’s work with interactive, real-time apps to quickly get insights on all the content in your pipeline.
With the building blocks of your custom content pipeline in place, you and your team can focus on what you do best: creating great content.