Content guidelines

Carousel access

• All SFU departments can use Carousel. Sub-departments (of any sub-set of a larger department) are not eligible.
• Departments must decide on a common login email address for all communicators on their team to use. 
• External organizations are not permitted to display their own content on screens, except in cases where it is specifically addressed in an official partnership agreement with the university. Departments can, however, publish content that represents a partnership with an external group (ie. a joint event), using Carousel's on-brand, editable templates.

Audience

• Your content should be applicable to the vast majority of students on campus.

Maximum number of bulletins

• Please limit yourself as a department to a maximum of two bulletins at a time.

Copy editing

• Copy should respect SFU's editorial style guide (for example, you should not capitalize every word in a sentence).
• Less is more. When crafting your screens message, appeal directly to the reader and be brief. Brief is memorable.
• Ensure that your message is self-explanatory, for example, rather than writing "Summer celebration: July 10, Convocation Mall" you might write "Join us for a summer campus celebration: Open to students, faculty and staff. Free food and games! July 10, Convocation Mall."

Look and feel

• Carousel uses pre-loaded, editable templates that simply require you to swap out text and images. Please do not pre-design your content outside of the system.
• Please do not add text to your background image. Instead, use the editable text field within the templates to convey your message.

Images

• You must pre-size your background image to 1920px by 1080px before uploading to a Carousel template.
• Please ensure that your image spans the entire 1920px by 1080px, as opposed to using, for example, a square image with empty space beside it.
• Please do not add text to your background image. Instead, use the editable text field within the templates to convey your message.

Logo use

• Do not add additional departmental, event, or external logos to the bulletins you create in Carousel.
• The screen templates do not include the SFU logo, which is the standard for the public-facing screens, and cannot be changed.
  
• Regardless of the department offering the message, the focus should be on direct, casual, self-explanatory messaging that makes a clear, direct appeal to the reader.

URLs

• Is your bulletin driving viewers to a webpage? We recommend using website homepages only, as your homepage URL is relatively brief and memorable. 
• Links must be from official SFU websites and include www.
• URL shorteners tend to produce difficult-to-recall strings of characters that can't be memorized/written down in the time available.

Run Time

• Content that you submit will run for a maximum of two weeks to ensure that the screens continue to engage students.
• A bulletin can be run a maximum of two times per semester and must have an interval of at least two weeks between runs.
• Content is reviewed for approval three times a week, so your bulletin will be published within two business days of when you submit it.

Campus-specific

• Content should be specific to the campus for which you are posting.

Video Specific Guidelines