Build a Content Calendar in Claude Design and Retire Your Sheets

Your content calendar lives in a spreadsheet. The creative sits in one Drive folder, the captions in a tab, the tagged UTMs somewhere else, and your boss has to click through all of it to approve one post. Then something happens in the world, you need to go dark for a week, and your afternoon goes to copying rows and praying you don’t break the formatting.

Claudia Sandino built the alternative on camera. She has spent 15 years doing this job by hand for brands from startups to the Fortune 500, and in this session she describes an interactive content calendar to Claude Design, watches it appear, then edits it by talking to it. No code. No design team. No template to buy.

By the end, she sends her boss one live link instead of four folder links, and pulls just the partnership posts for the week into their own visual layout on request. She also names what Claude Design cannot do yet, which is the part most tool demos leave out.

What we learned

• Claudia’s spreadsheet calendars took between a week and a month to build. She now gets a first draft from one conversation and refines it from there.
• She sets up a design system before she prompts anything, and keeps it to the logo, the fonts, and the colors, because bombarding it with files makes the output worse.
• Rescheduling is one sentence. She types “please move all of the posts from this week to next month” rather than re-sorting a sheet.
• Claude Design has no multi-person editing yet, so Claudia hands the file to Canva through MCP when her team needs to work in it together.
• With no brand kit and no MCP connected, Claudia says it makes things up, so she reads every cell and checks that the dates line up with the month.
• Claudia puts 80% of a social post behind the scenes and 20% on the platform, which is why she wants the planning artifact to look like something.

Timestamp index

• 00:00 Why spreadsheets stall social approvals
• 01:46 Access and budget, the two things that blocked non-designers
• 02:36 Set up the design system before you prompt anything
• 03:11 Why the perfect prompt matters less than the experience behind it
• 03:52 The calendar prompt she typed, dropdowns and ownership tabs included
• 05:11 The intake questions Claude Design asks first
• 06:46 Brief in Claude, or go straight to Design? Two working methods
• 08:01 What Claude Design is not, and what it makes instead
• 08:36 Handing the file to Canva through MCP
• 09:00 The second pass, when the calendar comes back clunky
• 09:53 A month of calendar building against a single conversation
• 11:00 Why 80% of a post never shows up on the platform
• 11:50 Sharing it as an artifact, a PDF, or a screenshot the boss approves
• 12:41 Moving a full week of posts with one sentence
• 13:36 The approval chain that used to cost four clicks
• 14:56 The limitations, and the review pass she never skips
• 16:25 Turning an Agorapulse data dump into a visual report
• 17:31 The reels production tracker she built with the time back
• 19:23 Where to find Claudia

The design system comes before the first prompt

Claudia starts in the design system panel, not the prompt box. Her instruction is to load the brand bible: the logo, the fonts, the colors. You can build it with Claude Code or drop the files straight in.

Then she draws a line. “You don’t want to over-Claude it,” she says. Feeding it everything you own produces worse output than feeding it four things and refining as you go. If you work on an enterprise account, the marketing team has usually uploaded the assets already, and anyone with access can use the design system without rebuilding it.

She skipped this step in the demo on purpose, and said so, which is why the first draft came back generic. That is worth watching for. The calendar she gets in the session is the unbranded version, and the gap between that and a branded one is the whole reason the design system goes first.

The prompt she typed, and why she won’t guard it

Claudia has a name for the thing people ask her most. “What prompt did you use? What did you say? Can I use it? Can I steal it? Can I pay for it?” Her answer is that the prompt is not the asset. The 15 years of building these calendars by hand is the asset, and the prompt is just how she hands over the spec.

What she typed, roughly: think like a social media strategy director, build an interactive social media content calendar, include dropdowns for Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn, include ownership tabs, build it for the rest of the year, and because this is social, include key holidays. She notes you can ask for the holidays in your own industry too.

Claude Design came back with questions rather than a calendar: her role, her content pillars, her posting cadence, her industry, and whether she wanted it laid out month by month. She answered social media manager, checked every pillar for the sake of the test, picked four to five posts a week, chose the creator industry, and hit send. Her framing on all of it: “You don’t have to have all the answers at the beginning.”

She also admits to being what she calls a lazy prompter, and defends it. Her argument is that she is having a conversation, not writing a spec, and that she can keep talking until the thing on screen matches the thing in her head. Mike’s summary of her second pass was that she told it to zhuzh it up.

Two ways into Claude Design, and how to pick

Mike works the other way round. He talks the problem through in Claude, has Claude help him think it out, writes the brief as an MD file, and drops that into a fresh Claude Design chat. He described treating Design as a subcontractor: hand over the job, let it go and do it.

Claudia went straight into Design and started talking. She has used Mike’s method too, and she gave the rule for choosing between them. If she is not sure what the calendar needs, or she is starting from scratch on something she has not touched, she goes to Claude first to ideate. If she already knows, she skips it. “The brainstorming sesh has to happen on Claude. But if you already have the brainstorming sesh done, you can go straight to Claude Design.”

Worth clearing up if you have not opened it: Claude Design is not an image generator. Mike put it as an Adobe Illustrator-type tool with a brain, making graphics, flat designs and interactive designs. It will not produce images with people in them.

One live link instead of four folder links

Here is the approval chain Claudia used to run. She sent her boss a link to the content calendar. He opened it, clicked through to the folder holding the creative, then to the folder holding the copy, then to the folder holding the tagged UTMs. Four destinations to approve one post. As she puts it, no boss wants 30 links to 30 documents when they could have one page of what they need.

The share menu gives her an artifact: a PDF, HTML, PowerPoint, a PNG, or a video. She copies the link and sends it to her team. She has also screenshotted a week and sent that to her boss, got the approval, and moved on. She is straightforward that screenshots are not the efficient route, and she uses them anyway when they work.

Claude Design is not multiplayer, so several people cannot sit in the file at once. What she does instead is send live links, and the team sees the current version without her resending anything. On an enterprise account, teammates can see her prompts and her edits, which she reads as a training channel: a junior can watch how a senior built the calendar.

The other request she fields constantly is a slice of the calendar. Someone asks for the partnership posts for the week, so she tells Claude to pull the partnership posts, put them in a separate document, lay them out visually, and show the link, the caption and the visual. She describes the pattern as speaking with Claude and telling it what she wants to see, instead of doing it herself and worrying about formatting again.

Editing by sentence instead of by cell

The edit that landed hardest in the session was a scheduling change. Claudia typed “please move all of the posts from this week to next month” and the calendar rebuilt itself. Her description of the old version of that job: go into the sheet, move everything, copy and paste, reformat, and hope she had not broken the format. She thinks worrying about formatting sounds ridiculous, then says the amount of time social media managers spend formatting content calendars in Google Drive is insane. Both of those things are true at once, which is roughly the point. Nobody outside the team ever sees the calendar. Her line: “Your CEO does not care about your content calendar.”

Mike flagged the smaller thing that makes the rest work. Asking for a calendar is not enough on its own, because August and September have different day counts and the dates land on different weekdays. Claudia never looked that up. Claude Design worked it out and built the grid in seconds.

What it cannot do, and what to check before you ship

Claudia names the collaboration gap as the biggest limitation, and the editing that goes with it. Her workaround is a handoff to Canva over MCP, where her team can edit together. For scheduling, MCP connects Claude to Agorapulse, so the calendar and the assets can go from Design to Canva to a publishing queue without a manual export.

The second limitation is more serious, and she does not soften it. Working raw, with no branding kit and no MCP, “it just makes things up.” So she reviews everything. Read every single cell. Confirm the dates are correct. Double-check that the dates align with the month and the holidays are the same. She said 100% about that twice.

Her third constraint is on you rather than the tool. You cannot come to Claude Design and ask it to do the job for you. You have to do the work first, which brings her back to the brainstorm. That is also the honest version of the lazy prompter argument: sloppy prompts work when the person typing them already knows exactly what the output should be.

Two more places she has taken this. She drops her reporting into Claude Design and asks for a visual deck of the quarterly, monthly, or weekly numbers, which gets past the fixed modules in a built-in report builder. And she built a reels production tracker to hold locations, props, and talent- work she used to hand to a producer or manage by spreadsheet. She still wants a human producer to execute and manage.

Grab the Episode 3 Blueprint

The Content Hub Conversation Script: the design system setup, the calendar prompt, the intake answers, the second pass, and the verification checklist Claudia runs before she sends anything to a boss. Download it here.

 

Full transcript

Lightly edited for readability. Speaker labels were corrected against the recording.

Mike Allton:
Welcome back to the lab. I’m Mike Allton. Static spreadsheets make managing social content clunky, messy, and frustrating for everyone involved. But today, Claudia Sandino, founder of AI for Social Media Professionals and veteran enterprise social media director, shows us how she replaced spreadsheets with interactive live content hubs built in Claude Design.

Hey, Claudia, when we were talking before the show, you mentioned that you used to live in Google Sheets for content planning. Where did that process start kind of falling apart when you needed your boss or teammates to review and approve posts?

Claudia Sandino:
Yeah, definitely. When I needed teammates to kind of be in the document, as you know, social is a very visual platform, and I think spreadsheets are great for, you know, numbers and really keeping track of things. But spreadsheets are not a great place to showcase the content. And you’re trying to get approvals from 10 million people, as you know, in the social team; you really need to provide the visuals, the asset, the copy, the link to, you know, where is this asset going?

And I think there are so many components that go into planning content and so many teams that touch it and so many people that need to approve it. It’s really nice to have a visual representation of what is going out.

Mike Allton:
That makes complete sense. I couldn’t agree more. I often have these tools make a visual presentation for me ’cause it’s, I find it’s easier to understand. But for people like myself who don’t code or design, what was holding us back from building these kinds of cleaner interactive workspaces before tools like Claude Design came along?

Claudia Sandino:
Access and budgets, you know? Access in the sense that, uh, a lot of social media managers don’t also have coding skills. We’re not, like, technical coders, so we couldn’t build these templates. We couldn’t really build these tools for ourselves. And budget, A lot of the time I didn’t have those design skills, so I would send it to my design team, and that eats up so much budget, so many billable hours, that if you work at an agency, your clients aren’t gonna pay for those hours that you spend designing decks, designing content calendars, making it look visual and nice for them.

Clients wanna see something ready and done and visual, and that takes time and energy and money, and I think that’s something that’s huge.

Mike Allton:
Oh, I couldn’t agree more.

Let’s go ahead and pull up your screen and show us your Claude design setup. Where do you start when you wanna spin up a new content calendar?

Setting Up the Design System First

Claudia Sandino:
All right. Claudia’s speaking about Claude. I love it. Um, so I’m not gonna do this today, but the first thing that you want to do is have your brand bible, your brand kit, whatever you call it, your graphics, your logo, your fonts.

You wanna create a design system. You can either create it using Claude Code, or you can, you know, drop your files right here.

And this is… You don’t wanna overload Claude. You don’t want to bombard it with things either. Keep it simple. Your logo, your fonts, your colors, and then you can refine as you go, of course.

So one thing that, you know, people tend to obsess about, I find, is prompting. Like, “What prompt did you use? What did you say? Can I use it? Can I steal it?” “Can I pay for it?” And I think that part of using AI for whatever your expertise is, in this case it’s social media, is knowing that you have the experience.

We’re humans. We’re still needed. AI has not taken our jobs. And it’s because you have the experience to tell it what you want. It’s a conversation. It’s like you’re having a conversation with an intern. You don’t have to obsess too much about having the perfect prompt as long as you know and have the experience to do what you’re creating or trying to do.

For example, everything that I do on Claude Design, I’ve done myself manually for every brand that I’ve ever worked for in the past 15 years of doing this job. Just have a conversation with it, you know. Think like a social media strategy director. Build me an interactive social media content calendar. Make sure to include dropdowns for, you know, we’re just gonna do Instagram and TikTok. I guess we’ll do LinkedIn in there, too. Include ownership tabs.

Build it for the rest of the year, and because we’re social media, include key holidays. And of course, you can also ask it to include key holidays in your specific industry and let it know so that you get all those, you know, fun, “It’s National Pizza Day,” if that’s what you still do.

And one thing that I also wanna emphasize is that it doesn’t have to be perfect. Your prompt doesn’t have to be perfect the first time around, especially with Claude Design. It’s very interactive. You work with it;  it updates very quickly.

If you don’t get it right the first time, you’ll get there. So first it’s gonna ask you a few questions. We’ll do that. We’ll keep it to social media manager. We’ll just add everyone in this case, and then content pillars; you add your own content pillars. We’ll go ahead and check all of these for the sake of just testing it. Posting cadence: let’s do four to five, and then industry: let’s do creator industry.

Month by month. Let’s do both here, and then send the answer. As I said, you don’t have to have all the answers at the beginning. This is very interactive. You see what it spits out at first. If it’s not perfect, you ideate.

The best part about using Claude Design for your content calendar is being able to customize it to what you need for your team. The, you know, the platforms you use, the people on your team, the dates that are important to you. So just keep in mind that this, this is something that is gonna really reflect what your brand needs, and I think that’s what makes me so excited about Claude Design, is that I’ve had all kinds of different clients in my, in my career, and they all have different needs. And a lot of the tools before, or, like, even spreadsheets, just felt one-size-fits-all. But I like the ability to make it unique to each brand; clients love this because they feel like you made it just for them. And back in the day, this would’ve taken your designers weeks to finish for you, and money that they were not gonna get from clients.

Brief First, or Straight Into Design?

Mike Allton:
Oh my gosh, yes. Now, one thing right off the bat that I noticed that’s different from how I’ve used this, which I thought was fascinating: you went straight into Claude Design and started having the conversation with Claude Design.

I think every time I’ve used Claude Design up until now, I’ve had the conversation in Claude, and I’ve had Claude help me think through what it is that I want Design to do, and then we create a brief as an MD file, and then I drop that into a new Claude Design chat.

So I’ve been treating Claude Design really as just a subcontractor, right? And we just give him the job, and it goes and does it.

Claudia Sandino:
Yeah, I think I’ve done it before the way that you’ve done it, and when I do it like that, I also find that it stems from ideating, right? So if I’m not sure what my content calendar needs, or what I know from doing this for the past 15 years, exactly what my content calendar needs. But if I am working on a project where my mind doesn’t exactly know what it needs, I do go to Claude first.

It’s like the brainstorming sesh. Like, the brainstorming sesh has to happen on Claude. But if you already have the brainstorming sesh done, you can go straight to Claude Design.

Mike Allton:
Yeah, yeah. So for those of you watching, if you’ve never used Claude Design before, you’re not gonna use this like ChatGPT or Nano Banana to create images. It’s a designer, like an Adobe Illustrator-type of tool that has a brain where it can create graphics for you: flat designs, interactive designs. I mean, I’m using it to create featured images and that sort of thing, but I’m not using it to create images with people.

It’s not gonna do that. It’s outside of the scope. But as we’ve been sitting here, it’s been building this entire system piece by piece, pixel by pixel, as we talked.

Claudia Sandino:
Yeah, absolutely. And one thing that you can do now is you can connect your Claude Design to your Canva. So you can, you know, build your strategy, build your content calendar. Let’s say you’re working on a one-pager or a strategy deck; you can connect that to your Canva and hand it off to Canva to kind of get all of the elements correctly.

Mike Allton:
That’s 100% right. So is it done, or is it still thinking?

Claudia Sandino:
Let’s see. So it’s done, but it’s not where I want it to be, right? So this calendar looks a little clunky to me. It’s not very visually appealing. So this is where I go in and work on the visual aspect of it.

So I know this is like not something a lot of people wanna admit, but I am a lazy prompter and I think that’s okay because I’m having a conversation with it, and I think AI is smarter than we let it out to be, and I think that’s why prompting is not that big of a deal. As long as you keep working with it, having conversations, letting it know what you want, and saying that, I think you’ll get to a place where, you know, you’ll get to something that looks like what you’re thinking in your head.

Mike Allton:
Yeah. You basically just told it to zhuzh it up, which is, you know, what Molly Mahoney would say.

Claudia Sandino:
Exactly. Zhuzh it up.

From a Month of Building to One Conversation

Mike Allton:
How long would this have taken you in the old method versus how long does it normally take you now to build out these calendars?

Claudia Sandino:
So back in the day, a content calendar build-out would take me anywhere from a week, if I’m working on it all the time, to a month. Yeah, it would take me about a month to build a content calendar that was comprehensive, that had everything that we needed. We were always updating and changing things like, “Oh my God, this whole week we can’t put…

There was a tragedy. We have to go dark. Move everything, you know, back a week.” But the point is, as social media managers, we know that things change very quickly, and in a spreadsheet, it would just be so clunky to have to go in, and it, it felt like an extra step, to be honest.

Something nobody sees, nobody cares about. Your CEO does not care about your content calendar. Only you care about it, you and your team, of course. You guys look at it every day, and it changes, and it’s dynamic, it’s interactive, it’s visual, and I think that’s something that was so hard to find in social media planning.

I feel like 80% of a post happens behind the scenes, and what you see on the platform is 20% of the work. It really is. Just using Claude Design to be able to create a content calendar that works for you, that has all of the elements that are needed for your team to truly be organized and get to a place where nobody’s asking questions like, “Where is the asset?

Which folder is this content in? Where’s the Excel sheet with the captions?” Where’s the Excel sheet with the links? Can you please change this? Can you do this?” There’s a lot of changes that need to happen, and they come from a lot of people. So keeping that in one place where I can see it and everyone can see it too.

Mike Allton:
Show us how this would work practically then. What, what would you do to share this with a boss or a team member?

Sharing the Calendar With Your Boss

Claudia Sandino:
Yeah, so you go right here. You go to Share. You can publish as an artifact: a PDF, HTML, or PowerPoint. There are more formats here. You can make sure it’s a PNG or a video. There are so many ways to send it. You just copy the link, and you send it to your, to your team, to your workspace.

Honestly, I’ve just taken screenshots of the week and sent it to my boss and got him to approve them like that, you know? One thing that I can also do is select.

I can say, “Show me the next three posts. Show me the quarterly post,” and I can send them to him as he needs them.

Mike Allton:
How are you putting actual posts or changing any of the scheduled posts in this calendar? What does that process look like for you?

Claudia Sandino:
So I just kind of go back to my, my little box here and I say, “Please move all of the posts from this week to next month,” and boom. Back in the day, I would have to manually go into my sheet and move everything, copy and paste, you know, reformat the sheet, hope and pray that I don’t mess up the sheet and the format. Formatting sounds very, like, you know, ridiculous to worry about, but the time, the amount of time that social media managers spend on formatting content calendars on Google Drive is insane.

Mike Allton:
It’s crazy, but that, that’s exactly right.

Just to say make it look like a calendar isn’t enough because we’re looking at, you know, right there in front of you, August, September, there are different days. You didn’t have to go look that up. It figured it out, created it for you in seconds. So how has switching to this entire process changed how quickly you get things like content approval?

Claudia Sandino:
Now I don’t have to send my boss a link to the content calendar, and then he goes in the calendar, and he clicks the link to the folder that has the creative, and then he clicks the link to the folder that has the copy, and then he clicks the link to the folder that has all of our, you know, tagged UTMs.

Like I said at the beginning, Excel sheets are great for organizing and really keeping track of content, but they’re not great for showing the visual aspects of it. So many teams touch so many different parts of one post.

And it organizes it in the way that makes sense for my team, right? So if my team is like, “Can you please just send our partnership post for the week?”

I can just tell Claude, “Pull up all of the partnership posts for the week and create a separate document just for those. Lay them out visually, show the link, show the caption, show the visual.” So the trend here is I’m speaking with Claude and telling it what I wanna see, what I want it to do, instead of having to actually do it myself and worry about formatting again or making it visual.

Doing something that before I had to hand off to my designer, but now I can do it myself.

Mike Allton:
Now, have you run into any kind of hiccups, challenges, formatting issues, that kind of stuff while trying to build these kinds of things? And if so, how’d you work around those?

Where Claude Design Falls Short

Claudia Sandino:
There are definitely limitations. Number one, the ability for multiple people to kind of edit it. I think that’s a big one. However, that limitation is easily kind of taken care of, so to speak, if you connect it with Canva. On Canva, you can then hand it off to your team, and then you can collaborate with your team and, you know, you guys can edit there together. I would say, definitely know what you want.

As you mentioned at the beginning, you kind of go to Claude first and, you know, you ideate, you get the thoughts down, you know what you want; you can’t come to Claude Design and kind of, you know, ask it to do the job for you.

You have to do the work first. The brainstorming sesh is really important. And review everything. Especially like this, when it’s raw, there’s no branding kit, no MCP, like no real guidance. It just makes things up.

So make sure that, you know, you bring your expertise, you read every single cell, and the dates are correct. I would even double-check that, you know, the dates align with the month, and the holidays are the same. Double-check everything 100%.

Mike Allton:
You’ve mentioned Canva several times, via MCP, which I’m glad you mentioned. Folks listening, maybe you’re not familiar with MCP. It’s like a USB port. It allows Claude to connect to other kinds of apps; by the way, via MCP, it’ll connect to Agorapulse.

So you can build out your content calendar in here, create the assets, ship them to Canva if you need to, and then you can push all of that to Agorapulse and schedule that out.

Claudia Sandino:
Also, if you’re using a tool like Agorapulse, one thing that’s a really cool use case is to drop your reporting into Claude Design and ask it to create a visual representation or a visual deck of your quarterly, monthly, or weekly reporting.

Mike Allton:
Oh, that is such a great tip. ‘Cause we have what we call power reports where you can pick and choose which modules and that sort of thing. But it’s still limited, right, to whatever our programmers and engineers decided to make available to you. If you just do a raw data dump of all of your data out of Agorapulse, whatever channels you want, then you can mix and match and have Claude pull those together in whatever way you want and communicate the stories of how you’re succeeding on social media in even more beautiful and effective ways.

But I think one of the coolest things you told me, Claudia, when we were first talking is that beyond this calendar, you also built a video production tracker for reels, and this is just to me a perfect example of what creative people do with the time they get back from AI.

What are the workflows? What are the kinds of things are you able to build now that you just never had the time or the tools to create before?

The Reels Production Tracker

Claudia Sandino:
Definitely the production. The production design is huge on Claude Design. Before, I would say I needed a producer to get all of this done. I would still need a human producer to execute and manage, of course. However, the producer’s job was really to organize, you know, location, props, talent, who’s gonna be in which video.

This is all something that I had to do manually back in the day using spreadsheets. You know, putting in names, putting in locations, props. Now I can just have a conversation with Claude Design and let them know everything that we’re planning, and again, interactive. You know, you can change it as you go.

If anything, you can switch out talent. I think staying organized is a big part of being a social media manager, and this is why Claude Design is our best friend in today’s age.

Because social media is so fun and visual and creative, being able to organize ourselves and our brains and put it, and kind of like just speak it into existence, it’s huge. Even for internal documents, we had to do a sales training, and we had to teach them how to use LinkedIn and, you know, just create a one-pager of the instructions and make it highly visual. Everything that they need is in that one-pager.

As a social media person, you do a lot of decks, a lot of pitches, all of that. Claude Design is very efficient, and it saves you a lot of time in planning because, as I said, 80% of the job in social is planning.

They don’t call us the invisible hands for nothing.

Mike Allton:
That is so true. And Claudia, you’ve been absolutely phenomenal. This has been so cool. I have really loved and enjoyed this deep dive into Claude Design. I know everyone watching has as well. Let them know where they can connect with you, or they can follow up if they’ve got more questions.

Claudia Sandino:
Yeah, definitely. So if you wanna connect with me, just follow me on LinkedIn, Claudia Sandino. That’s where I will answer all of your questions. If you want to know more about Claude Design, please do not hesitate to reach out. I love speaking about it. I’m still learning with you. I’m learning with the tools, with the platforms.

If you’re a social media person, slide into my DMs; I’d love to chat.

Mike Allton:
Folks, that is a wrap for today’s lab session.