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Onboarding: The First 90 DaysHow You'll Work Together

What is a PR calendar and how does it get built?

A PR calendar is a rolling 90-day plan that maps your real milestones (launches, funding, data, key hires) to specific outreach windows, with capacity held back for news you can't schedule. Your agency drafts it in the first few weeks of the engagement from your roadmap. You confirm the dates and supply the news. It is the one document that tells you what's going out, when, and why, before it happens.

Two kinds of moments fill it, and a credible calendar holds both:

  • Planned moments - milestones you control: a launch, a funding announcement, a customer result, a milestone number. Each gets lead time, usually a few weeks, never a same-week scramble.
  • Reactive moments - news you don't control: a competitor's move, a regulation, a trend reporters are already chasing. You can't date these, and the window to jump on one is too short to clear capacity after the fact, so the calendar reserves open capacity instead of pretending to schedule them.

The build is a short loop. The agency mines your roadmap for anything a reporter would care about, maps each item to a window, and hands you a draft. Your job is to confirm the dates are real, flag what's confidential, and surface the milestones the agency couldn't see. Only you can supply the raw material; an agency can frame and time a launch, but it can't invent a milestone you don't have. After that, expect a monthly refresh. Dates slip, deals close, the calendar moves.

Read the draft like a buyer. A calendar built on real events is a good sign. One padded with redesigns, reposts, and manufactured "thought leadership" moments means the agency couldn't find news and is scheduling activity instead. The draft also tells you your right scope: one genuine news beat next quarter is a project, a steady cadence is a retainer.

Treat the finished calendar as a forecast; no agency can promise the coverage on it. It shows where your share of the agency's pitch volume will land, and it's the document you brief your own team from before a moment hits. What each moment is supposed to achieve comes from the goals you set together, covered in the goals-and-kpis page, and who signs off on each item before it goes out is the approval-workflows page's territory.