We made another video for Mercersburg Academy, which they recently showed at an appreciation dinner.

The goal was to highlight the importance of endowments for the school, featuring interviews with both students and teachers. Endowments pay for faculty salaries, provides student scholarships, and ensures the highest quality education for Mercersburg students.

We are really proud of how this video came together and the opportunity to work with Mercersburg Academy.

Mercersburg Academy is one of the finest academic institutions we know of.

Founded in 1893 in the heart of Pennsylvania, Mercersburg is a private, coed, college preparatory boarding school. Their most notable almuni includes Jimmy Stewart, Benecio del Toro, 3 Medal of Honor recipients, and 54 Olympians. Quite the legacy! 

We worked with Mercersburg to create a video that will engage alumni in their 20′s and 30′s, motivating them to get involved in and support their True Blue Annual Fund. It was an incredible honor for us to work with an educational institute of this caliber.

We are really pleased with the final product, a unique 3-minute animated video that will be used at live events and in digital marketing campaigns.

Take a look…

Would you give Mercersburg a shout-out on Twitter to let them know what you think of the video? That would be amazing!

Tweet them: @Mercersburg
Let US know what you think, too!

Our incredible staff is what makes us who we are.

Since we began Cross and Crown, we have intentionally kept a high focus on our staff and their families. They are the life-source of our company, bringing not only their talents and abilities but also their energy, passion, and personality.

This is our tenth year as a company (Happy Birthday to us!), and we wanted our annual Staff Retreat to reflect the significance and value of that.

We took our staff and their spouses away for three nights and four days of FUN!

We wanted to demonstrate to our team how much we value and appreciate them—for their hard work and for who they are in our lives, personally and as a company.

While our main office is in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, we also have employees working out of Tennessee and Indiana. So the focus of our retreat this year was community.

We rented a house on Deep Creek Lake in Maryland, and the setting was perfect: a cabin in the middle of the woods with every possible amenity you could think of!

Some of the highlights:

•  We brought in a masseuse and treated everyone to a message
•  We arranged for a live-in caterer who prepared all meals and snacks
•  We spent a lot of time in the indoor pool and hot tub
•  We had a blast playing games together as a group

Everyone left the retreat with a stronger sense of community and camaraderie, and excited about what lies ahead at Cross and Crown.

What is done in your workplace to
care for and pour into the staff?

I’m not a neat freak at all, except when it comes to technology.

I’ll leave piles of clothes all over my house, but when it comes to my Mac or my iPhone, I have to be organized. To an almost OCD level.

I go crazy if my Mac desktop has more than one row of “stuff” and I have to keep my iPhone apps down to just one page worth. If I find a new game I like, I have to delete one from my Games folder so the new one fits.

Crazy? Maybe.

Here’s a screenshot of my one and only iPhone page… ya know, as proof:

 As for my favorite apps…

• Echofon
  This is a pretty sweet Twitter app because they also have a desktop version for Mac. What sold me is that it syncs with my iPhone, so when I have it open all day on my Mac and I get notifications, it WONT show up on my iPhone as well, until I close out of the desktop app. This is the best in my opinion if you’re an active Twitter user who’s on a computer for most of your work day.

•  Instagram / Camera+ / PicFrame
  These are my 3 photography needs. I’m in no way a photographer, but this makes me look super hipster and cool. And I like being cool. Camera+ does some different enhancements, then PicFrame does, well, frames, and then finally I upload to Instagram to be cool like everyone else.

• IMDB
  I’m a movie buff, and I’m constantly in that situation of “What was the name of the dude in ….” and “I’m telling you, the kid from a Christmas Story is an elf in the movie ELF – I’ll prove it.” Enough said here.

• DrawSomething
  It’s just so addictive. I even bought a SYLUS for the iphone so I could be better. ;) I have a current 80-something streak with a good buddy.

• Ultimate Guitar Tabs
  Being an active musician, I’m always in a situation where I need to look something up. The app is a couple bucks, but well worth it for guitarists.

Besides those, I rarely use anything else. Well, maybe the Alarm Clock, Settings (to change brightness/WiFi), and Angry Birds seasons when they add more levels. ;)

What are YOUR favorite apps?

I can be an iPhone app hoarder.

I love trying out all the latests and greatests when they come out. But they tend to pile up, and then it takes me longer than it should to weed through all my apps to find one I’m looking for.

Of course, I have my favorites that I use all the time. But I also have many that I never actually use.

So it was definitely time to do some Spring Cleaning.

I got rid of all the apps I never use.

I had quite a few apps I’d downloaded with good intentions, but never really found a practical use for. And some that I once used fairly often, but just don’t have a need for anymore.

It was time to clean house and get rid of them.

No sense taking up storage space on my phone for an app I will maybe use someday. Should I ever actually need it at some point, I can always download it again.

I prioritized the apps I do use.

I went really simple with this.

• My first page has all the apps I use most frequently. Most of them I utilize every single day.
• My second page is for apps I use often, but not everyday. I also keep some new ones here that I want to try out as I have time.
• My third page is kind of like my junk drawer. It holds the apps that I rarely need, but when I do, I’m thankful I know where they are.

I grouped apps into folders… But not all of them.

I combined similar apps into folders, and labeled them accordingly. It makes it much easier to navigate through that way.

On my first page, I kept a few individual apps on their own, outside of a folder. I want to reduce steps to access the apps I use the most. 

For me, it is important to have my phone, texts, email, Twitter, calendar, and Evernote be just a simple click away.

How about you? Is it time for a little iPhone Spring Cleaning?

How do you organize things on your phone?

I find it challenging to keep up with the never-ending stream of correspondence, and I’ve been known to roll my eyes—just a little—at those people who tweet about achieving “Inbox Zero.” An empty inbox is my unicorn… I’m not exactly sure it exists, but I’ll spend my entire life searching for it.

I’m trying to get better at implementing strategies that work within the reality of my life.

The main thing I’m working to master right now with my email is to only touch it once.

I have the bad and unproductive habit of keeping my inbox open and basically checking email all day, reading them as they come in. My tendency is to read or skim the emails as they arrive. If they are urgent, I’ll respond accordingly. Others I’ll quickly reply to because I can (or want to), and then some I leave there for another time.

The problem is the time I waste having to re-read and re-consider the emails when I come back to actually work on them. Rather than taking care of the task at hand, I return to it later and then have to re-evaluate what to do with the task. It basically costs me double time.

Touch it once.

I need to set strategic time to actually check my email, and then decide what to do with each one immediately after I read it. Reply. Delete. File. Delegate. Add to my task management program to finish later.  

In the long run, this will save me valuable time from coming back to revisit the same emails over and over again.

What’s your personal favorite strategy
for managing your email?

Your website is your first impression.

It’s the online front door of your church.

More often than not, people will check you out online before they will check you out in person. Love it or hate it, it’s reality. And churches would be remiss to ignore this important fact.

Yet many do.

Many church websites are, well, awful… Uninviting. Outdated. Underutilized. They offer unnecessary information and make the important stuff difficult to find, if it’s there at all.

Your website should be a reflection of your church. It should convey your DNA, culture, and values, so people get a sense of who you are from your online presence. It should be welcoming, engaging, and informative.

So what are the most important elements to a church website?

For me it boils down to a few key must-haves:

Clearly Visible Contact Details

The following should be visible on every page of your site:

• Street address (with a link to Google Maps)
• Phone number
• Email address
• Facebook and Twitter links

Don’t make people dig to locate how to find you or get in touch with you.

Easy Access to Relevant Information

It should be very easy for people to find what they are looking for. Keep the navigation clean and simple, with the most basic of details easily accessible. Address the questions people are most likely asking as they peruse your website. Here are a few basics:

• Service times
• Children’s and youth ministry information
• What to expect in a service
• What you believe
• Past messages (audio or video)
• Leadership/staff bios

If the pastoral team blogs, include their personal blogs and Twitter links in their bios. This gives people the opportunity to get a feel for the leaders of the church and the various ministries they lead. The more they know about a leader, the more connected they will feel.

Current Content

A site that isn’t maintained with up-to-date information implies stagnancy. Keep the content current and clearly visible on the home page. This encourages repeat visitors to the site as it looks fresh and updated each time they come.

• Blog the latest church news
• Highlight upcoming events
• Include the church’s Twitter/Facebook feed, and make sure both are being actively maintained

Good Graphic Design

Because your site provides people with their first impression of your church, you want to be sure it visually represents you well. But sometimes in an attempt to be innovative or unique, websites end up being cluttered and difficult to navigate. Don’t try to be fancy or even original. Just keep your site clean, neat, and focused.

Remember that while design is important, it’s not the reason people are visiting your site. They come looking for specific information. So provide it to them, and make it easy to find while still visually appealing.

What would you add to this list?

When you visit a church website, what do you look for?

To this…

We absolutely loved getting to work with Alaska Village Missions.

We re-branded them, designed their new website, and built them a display for expos and conferences. We really believe their new look more clearly and strongly expresses who they are.

They do amazing work in Alaska, establishing indigenous churches, leading a Bible school, and launching trained pastors and Christian workers into remote regions. Get to know them!

Make sure you check out their new site to read more
about what God’s doing through them! 

We recently worked with the Churches of God denomination to build their new website. And we are pretty excited about the end result!

Be sure to check out the full website here >

I really appreciate how he unpacks why we do what we do:

We really wanted to have a focus on missions organizations and nonprofits, and really fill a void of quality artwork and marketing at affordable prices. What we try to do is really look for an opportunity to come across a nonprofit or an organization and offer them the highest quality of design and marketing that we can, at affordable prices—not agency-level prices that many organizations and companies are paying worldwide. 

Make sure you read the entire article so you can get to know more of our heart and focus as a company.

I am so proud to be part of the Cross & Crown family!