I started this year with a goal of making an impact to the community. I didn’t have a clear plan of how I was going to do it, but I knew I was going to do it. Then I met Ashwin. He told me about an idea he had to make an impact. It was big. It was bigger than I had originally imagined.

He wanted to restore prestige to the Chicago chapter of a South Asian non-profit called the Network of Indian Professionals. I hadn’t held the highest regard for the organization as I had seen it’s decline across several chapters from years before. “We can change that perception”, Ashwin told a crowd of 50 people. I’ve always been proud of my heritage, and never being one to slink away from the challenge, I bought into the vision and jumped on board.

Now flash forward 8 months.

That’s us on stage at the NetIP North America conference in Seattle accepting the Best Chapter award for the Chicago chapter. We made an impact.

I couldn’t be more proud of the work every single person did this year to change the perspective of NetIP Chicago. Late night planning sessions, early morning setup meetings, and all day working meetings, kept the chapter going. A team of people who saw “what was” and made “what could be” happen.

Congratulations to the entire NetIP Chicago board and the greater Chicago community! And as a parting note, here’s my 2nd favorite moment at the conference:

Yeah it’s been a while since I lit up the grill, but today it felt like I hadn’t missed a beat. It took a couple pizzas to get the dough stretching down, but when I did it turned out great.

Check out how my margherita pizza came out!

I recently wrote about the importance of the first 320 characters for a Facebook event. The rationale at the time was that Facebook would auto-publish the event to your Page wall and only the first 320 characters would be visible on the wall. The rest could be read if the reader clicked through to the event page.

Recently (in the last week), Facebook revamped their Facebook event page design and, low and behold, Facebook now truncates your event description. Gone are the days when you could provide every detail for your event without really thinking about the layout. Now Facebook will show the first 400? characters (haven’t confirmed the exact character count yet), and the rest will be hidden behind a “see more” link.

I like this new change for one reason, it helps me sell the importance of the first couple lines in a Facebook event. I’ve always advocated the need to keep descriptions short and action oriented. Here’s the anatomy of future Facebook events I create for organizations:

• [150 words to briefly describe the event and why the reader wants to come]
• [Shortened links to purchase tickets and/or learn more about the event]
• [Ancillary information that can provide more value, but can also be found in other areas]

The attention span of the average reader is shrinking, so our copy should be shrinking to match it.