Set Your Goal

You want to be effective in digital ministry. Set SMART goals. (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely).

Know Your Audience

How to create a persona, based on research, educated assumptions, and real experiences. to help you in digital ministry.

Social Media Basics

Best practices and key tips as you get started in the world of social media for ministry.

Create a Journey

A content journey is taking your user through a digital journey, step-by-step, going from one call to action (CTA) to another.

Intro to Analytics

Analytics can help you see where God is at work in people’s lives online, and evaluate the effectiveness of your digital efforts.

Put It All Together

Final instructions for a new digital strategist.

Marketing to Expand Your Reach

This section provides training and resources to help you grow in your marketing capabilities.

Analytics

Find playbooks for using and leading with analytics, webinars, and step-by-step guides for using our Cru analytics tools.

Social Media Management

Find training and how-tos for managing your social media channels as well as running social media campaigns.

Email Campaign Management

Find helpful resources to help you get started with Adobe Campaign and to run your first email campaign.

Content Management Systems

Cru supports two content management systems that can host your website: Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and WordPress.

Learning Management Systems

Find helpful resources to help you get started with the right Learning Management System (LMS) to fit your training needs.

Downloads

Worksheets and diagrams to help you plan your strategy

Glossary

What does THAT mean? Find the answer here!

Cru Digital Ecosystem

Directory of the supported apps and sites we use for ministry

Assets

Best Practices for Images

Image Naming Convention

  • Use all lowercase characters -- no capitalization please -- and numbers
  • Instead of spaces, use hyphens
  • Instead of underscores, use hyphens
  • Do not use special characters like apostrophes, quotes, etc.
  • The only period "." should be before the file extension (e.g.: my-great-picture.gif but NOT my.great.picture.gif)
  • Make use of sub-folders within Assets, as they help organize your content
    • If you can’t find one that fits your need, make a new sub-folder

Image Sizing

  • Image size for full width hero images - 2880x800
  • Image ratio should be 16:9 for standard tiles, and main article images, slightly less than 16:9 for full-width blade components

Asset Renditions (Prevent Blurry Images)

Say for example that you need to upload an asset to the DAM in AEM. You get a graphic design from some digital miracle workers and you’re really excited with how it turned out. You’re ready to put it on your site and to your surprise the image looks a bit blurry and not as nice as the original file. There are many reasons for why this may happen, in this document we’ll go over a few things you can do to limit this as well as best practices in general when working with assets.

We typically use PNG’s for graphics/illustrations - It may still need compressing a bit, but that should help some with the quality. JPEG images by nature lose quality when they are uploaded, and they do not infinitely scale or compress. If you need assistance or would like to talk more about this topic, feel free to reach out to our team at aem@cru.org

It may help too to resize it prior to uploading so that it isn’t being resized from (for example) 5000 px wide down to 1400….Some authors have experienced issues with quality loss from the resizing that the components do. To sum up, AEM creates renditions of images that you upload into the system. These renditions are created at specific breakpoints to define what the image will look like on Desktop, Tablet, and Mobile. To learn more about asset renditions, we recommend checking out Adobe’s documentation on the topic.

Below are a list of components that are heavily used for images...

  • Blade
  • Center CTA
  • Teaser (background image)
  • Blade Multifield
  • Image
  • Text Image
  • Tile
  • Auto-generate Tile
  • Hero Marketing
  • Ad Banner

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