Campaign Calendar

What this tool does

CM8-379 puts the marketing year on one timeline and answers three questions a calendar on a wall cannot: what clashes, whether the work can actually be built in the time available, and who is carrying it.

Everything runs inside this single file — no account, no upload, no network request of any kind.

What one row is

One row is one campaign, with the dates it runs, who it goes to, who owns it, and how many days of work it takes to build. The build effort is what turns a calendar into a plan; without it, a calendar shows only that nothing overlaps on the day it launches.

Clashes

Two campaigns going to the same audience within the clash window are flagged. The audience matters more than the channel — an email and a direct mail to the same customers in one week is a clash; an email to customers and a paid campaign aimed at strangers is not.

Campaigns aimed at nobody in particular are excluded from clash detection entirely, because broadcast activity does not compete for a specific person's attention.

A clash is a prompt, not a verdict. Sometimes it is two people who did not talk to each other; sometimes it is a deliberate coordinated push. The tool cannot tell which and does not try — the clash table names both campaigns, both owners, and which of the two can actually move.

The build window is the real calendar

Campaigns look comfortably spread out on a launch-date view and their build windows almost always overlap. The second timeline shows when the work actually has to happen, and it is usually a much less comfortable picture.

Leave the build start blank and the tool places it using the lead time in Settings. Set it explicitly for anything with a longer run-up — an event booked six months out, a piece of research.

Build pressure

Compared against the weekly capacity you set. Above it, the campaign cannot be built in its window by the people you have; well below it, there is slack.

The capacity figure should be what is left after everything else the team does — the always-on work, the reporting, the meetings. A team of three is not fifteen days a week of campaign building; it is usually six to eight.

Note the honest limitation: pressure is calculated per campaign against the whole team's capacity, so two campaigns being built in the same fortnight will each look fine and together will not. The owners chart is the check on that.

Fixed dates

Events, seasonal deadlines, award entries, product launches announced to customers. Tick the box and the campaign is marked with a diamond in the calendar table.

It matters when resolving a clash: if one of two clashing campaigns is fixed, there is only one conversation to have, and the clash table names which one it is.

The quiet period

Set the dates of a holiday shutdown or a period when the audience genuinely is not listening, and campaigns overlapping it are flagged. Every year somebody schedules a nurture sequence to land while the whole industry is away, and every year it is discovered in the last week.

Dependencies

Record what a campaign is waiting on in one line: photography, a product launch, a signed contract, a legal review. Campaigns still marked planned with a dependency recorded are flagged as waiting.

The tool does not schedule dependencies or chain them — it records them so that when a dependency slips, you can see in one place what else moves. The sample has two campaigns waiting on the same photography, which is exactly the situation worth spotting early.

Bunching

The monthly chart shows how many campaigns go live each month. Almost every calendar bunches — three in one month and none in the next two — usually because campaigns get planned around internal events rather than around the audience.

The audience experiences bunching as noise followed by silence, and the silence is where lists go cold. Spreading launches is often worth more than improving any single campaign.

Keep the dropped ones

Mark a cancelled campaign as dropped rather than deleting it. It records that the decision was made, stops the same idea being re-proposed, and at the next planning session the list of what was dropped and why is more useful than the list of what ran.

What this cannot do

• It cannot tell you whether a clash matters.
• It compares build effort against a weekly average, so a fortnight with three builds looks the same as a fortnight with one.
• It does not schedule anything or chain dependencies — it records them.
• It knows nothing about how long a campaign should run, or about seasonality beyond the quiet period you set.
• It says nothing about whether any of these campaigns is worth running. That is a campaign return question.

Printing and sharing

The Report tab prints both timelines, the calendar and the clash table with a title block you fill in. The build timeline is the one worth circulating: everybody has seen a launch calendar, and almost nobody has seen when the work behind it has to happen.

Saving your work

The calendar is held in this browser, on this computer, and stays there between visits. Use the backup button to write a JSON file you control.

Accuracy & disclaimer

Every date and estimate here is yours. The tool overlaps them and compares effort against a capacity figure you set; it has no view on whether an estimate is realistic, and build estimates are optimistic almost everywhere.