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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 - they aren’t rows you add or remove here.

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.

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.

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 posts behave - 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 A KPI that has since been archived is still listed, greyed with (archived), so retained history stays visible.

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, Pending, Publishing, Scheduled, 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. Events never show a publish status, and cards from Planning carry no status badge at all.

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.

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.