External calendar
The External calendar is where you plan your external communications on a shared, channel-based calendar. Open External from the top navigation and choose the Calendar tab.
It’s the external counterpart to the internal Announcements calendar, with the same Year, Week, Month, and List views. (The External area also holds Social Media publishing, Press, and Strategic Briefs - see Social publishing for composing and scheduling posts.)
The calendar is organised into rows - one lane per channel on the Year grid. Every company starts with a set of built-in rows for the usual external channels; on top of those, admins can add their own (below).
The Year grid also shows one row per connected social account (Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok). Your scheduled and published posts land on those rows automatically, and so do drafts you’ve given a date (see Drafts on the calendar). They aren’t rows you add or remove here.
Custom calendar rows
Section titled “Custom calendar rows”Beyond the built-in rows, an admin can add your own custom rows - extra labelled lanes for whatever strands of external comms you plan.
Open Manage rows (the gear on the calendar toolbar) to:
- Add a row - give it a title (up to 40 characters), an icon, and a colour. Up to 20 custom rows.
- Edit or delete a row. Deleting one keeps its events on the Week, Month, and List views, but they drop off the Year grid until you move them to another row.
Built-in rows are shown for reference and can’t be changed, and a custom row can’t reuse a built-in name. Managing rows is admin-only; everyone still sees the rows on the calendar.
Events
Section titled “Events”Editors can add an event with Add Event on the calendar toolbar - a titled entry placed on a row, on a date that can be all-day or span multiple days, much like an announcement on the internal side. An all-day event shows All day rather than a start time. Events dated within the next seven days also appear on the Pulse Timeline on your dashboard, alongside your scheduled posts - see HIVE Pulse.
An event can also link a strategic brief and one or more KPI goals, using the same pickers as a Planning card.
Clicking an event opens a read-only card - the same way a post opens a preview (a draft is the exception, below) - with Edit and Delete on it, so you can read the detail without opening the editor. The card shows the title, status, event type, the linked brief (with its quarter and year), KPIs, dates, and description. A KPI that has since been archived is still listed, greyed with (archived), so retained history stays visible.
Drafts on the calendar
Section titled “Drafts on the calendar”A social post you’ve saved as a draft with a date appears on the calendar on that date - on its account’s row on the Year grid, and on the Week, Month and List views - in the Draft colour from the legend. A draft with no name shows as Untitled Post. A draft without a date doesn’t appear on any view; you’ll find it among your posts on Social publishing.
On the Week, Month or List view, clicking a draft switches to the Social Media tab and opens it in the composer, so you can carry on where you left off. Every other post opens its preview. On the Year grid, clicking any item takes you to that week.
A draft that has been sent for approval leaves the calendar while it waits for a decision. It comes back as a draft if the request is sent back or cancelled, and once it’s approved it’s published or scheduled and appears as that post. While it waits, you’ll find it at the top of the latest posts on the External home, marked Approval requested - see While it waits.
Status legend
Section titled “Status legend”Every view carries a status legend below the header.
The external calendar holds two different kinds of item, and their status vocabularies overlap in wording while meaning different things - so the legend splits them into two labelled groups:
- Posts - the publish lifecycle: Draft, Scheduled, Publishing, Published, Partial, Failed, Deleted.
- Events - the planning statuses: Idea, Drafting, Needs review, Scheduled, Live.
So a Scheduled post (queued to publish) and a Scheduled event (planned) are different things, and the legend keeps them apart by group rather than by colour: Draft and Drafting, Scheduled and Scheduled, and Published and Live each share a swatch, so read the group heading when the two words look alike. On YouTube a Scheduled post isn’t queued in HIVE at all - the video is already uploaded and held private until the time you chose. While YouTube is still receiving the video, the post shows as Publishing instead. Events never show a publish status, and cards from Planning carry no status badge at all.
The legend has no entry for approval. A draft waiting for approval isn’t on the calendar, so there’s nothing to key.
Holidays
Section titled “Holidays”Your calendars can show public holidays. Choose which countries under Settings → Preferences → Calendar Holidays - “Show public holidays from these countries on your calendars.”
Twelve countries are available: Sweden, UK, US, China, Canada, Australia, India, Germany, Netherlands, Finland, Norway, and Denmark. Each is colour-coded, and you can pick several at once.
This is a personal setting - it changes what you see, not what your colleagues see.
Cards from Planning
Section titled “Cards from Planning”Communication cards from Planning can appear here too. On a card, tick Show on calendar, choose External, and pick the row - the card then shows on the external calendar alongside your events. See Show a card on the calendar.