I volunteer for a number of community organizations and I have been a lunch buddy through Big Brothers Big Sisters for two years now.

At the end of the 2012 school year, I received this notepad from the volunteer coordinator at Garfield Elementary School in Cedar Rapids.

Why do I think this is worth mentioning on here? I do appreciate getting this because:

I always need notepads.

But more importantly…

I love the message … for the next little while while using this notepad I will be reminded why volunteering is important.

Volunteers … Making a difference in the lives of others.

Great message and reminder.

Let’s take this site for example. Depending on how you are viewing it, the pictures might appear on the right or on the top of the content. The sidebar might be below all the homepage posts (especially on mobile) and not on the right where it would be on a desktop or laptop computer. But the posts might look different, yet, in the email newsletter or in an RSS reader.

Some words may not work across platforms and devices.

Some examples of words to potentially avoid

“Pictured at right/below”
Depending on the site’s design and the user’s device the picture might not be at right but instead below. This blog, as mentioned, uses responsive design and pictures show differently on different devices.

This also doesn’t work as nicely if posts are automatically fed into an email newsletter. The post might say “the picture below” but email readers actually have to click over to the website to see the picture and the rest of the post.

Solution: Don’t use the phrases. Use self-explanatory pictures and/or add a caption/cutline. Don’t even call the photos out in the copy. They should work without saying: At right….

“After the jump”
I don’t see this all that often anymore but I do see this. This refers to that the story continues after clicking on a link (and stems from the newspaper industry where stories jumped from the front page and continued on another page).

This works for readers who are visiting the site’s homepage. “After the jump” makes sense to them. But this doesn’t work on RSS feeds or if somebody has a direct link to the article. It’s not necessary for those readers and might not even make sense.

“As mentioned above”
I usually notice this in books (on my iPad Kindle) where the author says this and whatever is supposed to be above is actually on a previous page.

Solution: Say “as mentioned earlier” or avoid this altogether.

Not words: Some picture alignments or naming conventions don’t work
We might as well assume that everything that is typed into a picture field or on WordPress will be public somewhere.

At United Way of East Central Iowa, where I’m currently the VP of Communications and Innovation, we publish a monthly Young Leaders Society profile. The one about Amber Doyle can be found here.

As you can see in the first screen grab the web version has no text with her and her family’s photo. (By the way, did you notice how I didn’t say: The screen grab ON THE RIGHT? It’s hard not to. I caught myself wanting to write ON THE RIGHT. Because as I’m writing this it indeed will be ON THE RIGHT, but some of you will see it ABOVE.)

But check out the second picture, which is how this same post displayed in Flipboard, an iPad reading app. The title of the picture shows up here “Amber Doyle cropped,” which is what I called this picture when I cropped it. But why do my readers have to see this?

Main take-aways

Words matter, especially in our online blog posts. As devices continue to evolve it’s important for us – the content producers – to consider how our chosen words add value to our consumers.

If we say to check out the picture below, but it’s not below, that doesn’t add value. It might even be confusing. Saying that a photo is “cropped” is only useful for internal purposes.

How do we remember this? Some words, are just good to eliminate completely (see above), but I’m sure we’ll run across more examples down the road. At that point we’ll just learn from those.

- Christoph

By Mary Sharp

Christoph Trappe was sixteen years old when he left Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1995 and moved half a world away to go to high school in Iowa City, Iowa.

He’s now 35, a U.S. citizen, and one of the top young professionals in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

When Christoph arrived in the United States, he was a foreign exchange student at Iowa City West High School. He played football there two years and was recruited to continue playing at the University of Iowa, where he was a scholarship player for four years, graduating with a degree in journalism in 2001.

Christoph worked for daily newspapers in Muscatine, Iowa City and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and then for a video training company. He became a U.S. citizen in 2008 and is now vice president of communications and innovation for United Way of East Central Iowa in Cedar Rapids.

He also married Rachel Ott, and their daughter Sophie is now five.
Which has to count as quite a story in anyone’s book.

“You set a goal and kind of go for it,” Christoph says.

Christoph is a big guy and started getting interested in American football when he was thirteen and playing club games in Germany, where he met some U.S. football players, including former Iowa Hawkeyes. Then he saw Joe Montana and the 49ers play a pre-season NFL game in Berlin.

“I was hooked,” he says.

While lifting weights at Rheinstadion (Rhine Stadium), he became interested in how one man always seemed to be telling stories. Christoph found out the man was a journalist and thought that might be something he’d like to do, too.

So his thinking became two-pronged. If he wanted to play football, he needed to move to the United States. If he went to the United States, he needed to learn English. There were two ways to do that, his teacher in Duisburg told him: Study English vocabulary really hard or move to the United States.

So moving to the United States made sense, and Christoph began investigating becoming a foreign exchange student.

It took a while, but he remembers the day he got the phone call telling him that Tony and Chris Forcucci in Iowa City would be his host family. At that exact moment, he says, he was wearing an Iowa Hawkeyes’ shirt given to him by former Hawk linebacker John Hartlieb.

The Forcuccis told Christoph they lived just down the street from Kinnick Stadium, where the Hawkeyes play their home games.

It took a year to make all the arrangements. He went through an orientation where the U.S.-bound students were encouraged to smile a lot–“to show your teeth”–in a country where, Christoph says, he found most people “very friendly.”

Was it hard to make the decision to leave Germany and live abroad?

“Not really,” Christoph says. “I would have kicked myself all my life had I not taken the opportunity.
“When I put on that (Hawkeye) uniform and went on the field, I thought, ‘I’m on a Division I football team.’ How does that not outrank being at home, joining the military for two years, and then trying to get back in that groove? Here, I might make it to the NFL, I might not. But, at the very least, I’m going to get an education. So there really wasn’t anything negative that you could foresee.

“These are the things you have to think about–what’s important in your life? What kind of advice would you give your best friend if they had to make the same decision?”

How about majoring in journalism when English is your second language?
Again, not a problem.

“I didn’t go into journalism for the writing,” Christoph says. “I’m not a ‘writer,’ not a journalist, not even a reporter, though I’ve worked as one. I’m a story teller, a community builder.”

That said, the path to U.S. citizenship was “a lot of work,” he adds. “It takes a long time, it’s complicated, it’s expensive.”

But, again, it was a clear-cut choice.

“You live here. This is where your life is. Why wouldn’t you do it?”

More from The Gazette here.

From the United Way of East Central Iowa Marketing Blog:

Our iPhone volunteer app was mentioned in this report for the George H. W. Bush Volunteer Generation Fund on page 50. The mention says that our app makes “volunteer opportunities more accessible.” You can download the app here.

With that in mind this caught my eye at the ImpactCR table at the Corridor Welcome Reception at the Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance on May 7, 2013.

This is so easy. Leave your card in the bowl to stay in touch. No lengthy sign-up required.

The easier the sign-up the more likely I am to get on the list, especially if I’m on the fence on whether to sign up or not.

Full disclosure: I’m on the ImpactCR Board, staffed the table that night but had nothing to do with the set-up. Thanks, Mallory Mohwinkle!

(Filed from my iPhone)

The Example

One of those stories involved a Tiffin woman who told the judge that she could not have been speeding because she was driving by a church and always says a prayer when she drives along that stretch of road. Had she been speeding she would not have had enough time to finish the prayer, she said.

The Added Details

I share this story with the details above verbally during presentations and training sessions on how to tell a good story. I then ask the audience: “What did the church look like? Who can describe it to me?”

Usually a handful of hands go up.

“It was a white church, near the street.”

“It was built with bricks, brown. The front door was white.”

Other descriptions follow. None match up, of course. How could they? I didn’t describe what the church looked like. I don’t actually know what it looked like.

How do people know? I’ve asked groups this and typically the answer goes something like this:

“That was just how I pictured it.”

Good Stories are Memorable

Perhaps, engaging and interesting stories draw people in so much that they add some of the details themselves? They visualize the story and fill in the unmentioned details based on their own experiences? Is that possible?

I’m not saying we should leave out details that are necessary for a story, but perhaps good stories that are engaging are more memorable because they provide a visual in a person’s mind.

Perhaps the takeaway for us storytellers: Share the basics. Share only what really needs to be shared. The listener imagines some of the other details and remembers your story later on.

The Wrap

What’s the point of sharing this?

First of all, I heard these answers first in casual conversation during a group session. I’d never put much thought into people doing this. I started asking groups I was speaking to more deliberately. I started to hear a recurring theme: People add their own details to a good story. It just happens.

Second of all, it made me think about what details to share. For this kind of story there are all kinds of things that could be shared:

1. What kind of road she was driving on.
2. The type of her car.
3. The weather.
4. Details about the police car or the police offer.
5. Etc.

But would those details when told actually add to the story? Probably not. In fact, a listener might tune the storyteller out if there are too many potentially unnecessary details.

Sometimes even typically important  facts might not be that important. For example, when I share this story in presentations I never mention how fast the ticket said she was going or what the speed limit was on that road. And, nobody ever asks. Perhaps, while traditionally this might be considered an important fact, it doesn’t actually add all that much to the gist of the story.

This is a picture of me having breakfast with Jack in another room before the event. Yes, we hid him.

From the article:
Simonelli says he learned about Instagram the hard way; one of his sources informed him that a local gang member had snapped a picture of Simonelli while he was out to dinner with his family. That photo was put on Instagram with a derogatory remark about police.

“I had no idea about it until it was provided to me,” he said. ”As I explain to cops, teachers, everybody, you always have to be watching your surroundings. You never know, I didn’t see that individual take a picture of me. Doesn’t take long for anybody to take a quick picture on a phone nowadays.”

This is something I continue to talk about in social media presentations.

Do I have a right to privacy when I walk my dog? Probably not. Can somebody take my picture and post it wherever? Probably.

It will feel awkward, perhaps, but can they do it? Sure. Is it legal in all instances to take somebody’s picture and post it? Maybe not, but that doesn’t mean people won’t try.

People thinking about doing this, though, might consider this: How will the other person feel if I post this photo? Will it help us build a better connection? Will they be happy or embarrassed?

Taking a photo of a person speaking to a group about public communication (which I do from time to time) they probably won’t mind if you post it. They might even appreciate it. I know I do.

But what if you take a not-so-flattering picture of them? WIll they feel the same positive way? Maybe not. I know I’ve taken pictures of people speaking at events and they didn’t turn out very flattering. So, I didn’t post them.

Perhaps the question to ask: How would I feel if I was the person in the picture?

When in doubt: Ask. “Would it be OK to post this picture?”

Some people – including the gang members mentioned in the Fox article – wouldn’t do that, but it could help build connections and share something publicly at the same time.