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A campaign that involves more than one person needs a timeline. Not because timelines are inherently useful, they’re not, if nobody looks at them, but because without one, different people are working from different assumptions about when things are supposed to happen and what order they need to happen in.
A Gantt chart is a simple way to solve this. It shows activity over time on a single view, it’s easy to update, and it’s easy to share. It doesn’t require specialist software. A well-set-up spreadsheet does the job.
Work backwards, not forwards
The first instinct when building a campaign timeline is to start from today and plan forwards. This tends to produce timelines that are optimistic about how long things take and end up compressed at the end when reality catches up with the plan.
Start instead from the campaign launch date (or the key milestone you’re working towards) and plan backwards. If a piece of content needs to be live on 15 May, when does it need to be signed off? If it needs to be signed off by 8 May, when does the first draft need to be written? If the first draft needs to be written by 1 May, when does the brief need to go out?
Planning backwards tends to reveal dependencies you’d have missed otherwise, and it surfaces the moments where things are likely to go wrong before they do.
Group activity by channel, not by team
The most useful way to organise a campaign timeline is by channel, press, digital, social, content, events, internal, rather than by team or workstream. This makes it easy to see the whole campaign at a glance, spot where channels are clustered too closely together, and identify periods where there’s nothing going out.
If you’re coordinating across multiple teams, each team can add their own rows within the relevant channel groups. The result is one shared document rather than separate timelines for press, digital, and events that nobody is comparing to each other.
Keep it alive during the campaign
A timeline that’s built before the campaign and never updated during it is a record of what you intended, not what’s happening. Update it as the campaign runs. Mark activities when they go live, note when things slip, add the status column entries that tell your manager what’s done and what isn’t. Used this way, the timeline also doubles as a progress report.
A template to work from
The campaign timeline planner is a 13-week Gantt-style Excel spreadsheet with activity rows grouped by channel. Replace the week numbers with your actual dates, add your specific activities, and mark progress by filling cells or typing short labels. Comes with a PDF reference version and a how-to tab explaining each section.
Communications Campaign Gantt Planner
Editable Excel workbook with a 13-week Gantt chart and a PDF reference version.