Video: Saving for Retirement (401ks) in Plain English
By leelefever on September 30, 2009 - 1:31pm
Today we've published a new video "Saving for Retirement in Plain English".
Since we first considered making the series of videos on Money, we've had our eyes on retirement savings. Not just our retirement, but yours. Too many people start saving too late and/or don't know the basics of why retirement accounts like 401ks and IRAs make sense. This video is aimed at helping people see the long term benefits of retirement accounts.
Who is it for? Along with use in schools, we see this video being a tool for companies who offer retirement programs. This video can be licensed for use by HR (or financial organizations) that have the goal of increasing awareness and adoption of the programs.
This video will join the other Money videos in a forthcoming "Financial Basics Pack" of 6 videos:
The release of this video also marks a break for our recent focus on money and a return to technology. More coming soon!
View With CommentsTwitter.com Now With Less Common Craft
By leelefever on July 29, 2009 - 10:41pm
Well, it was a good run. Twitter recently redesigned their home page and the link to the Common Craft video "Twitter in Plain English" has been removed. Here's the story of how it got there:
Back in February of 2008, I shared the video with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. After making a handshake deal, the video appeared via a "watch a video" link from Twitter.com.
Twitter decided to use the dotSUB player for the displaying the video, which enabled the video to be watched with subtitles in many languages. The video has since been translated into 69 languages. As of today, about 1.5 years later, that video has been viewed over 8.7 million times via the dotSUB linked from Twitter.com.
The Twitter folks put a link along with the video to CommonCraft.com, which sent a lot of people in our direction.
Now that the page has been redesigned, the link to the video and to Common Craft are no more. But we're not sad. We're so honored to have been a part of helping educate people about Twitter - a simple idea that's very hard to explain. In the end, Twitter helped raise the visibility of our work and the work of explainers in general. We heard many, many times "We want a video like you did for Twitter." Thanks to Biz, Ev and the Twitter team for giving Common Craft the opportunity to a part of an amazing trajectory. We'll never forget it.
While the video isn't linked via on Twitter.com, it's obviously alive and well on CommonCraft.com. We recently published Twitter Search in Plain English as a follow on.
View With CommentsInsurance in Plain English
By leelefever on July 21, 2009 - 10:13am
Video: Twitter Search in Plain English
By leelefever on June 16, 2009 - 3:09pm
Today we released a new video called "Twitter Search in Plain English"
The video uses an metaphor of the small town of "Twitterville." The town has an election and the people use Twitter to track real-time news, a hashtag to organize discussions and trends to find new information.
While it wasn't our intention, the video matches closely with the events currently taking place in Iran, where people are using Twitter to organize and share news about their disputed election.
If you know people who get Twitter, but don't understand things like hashtags and trending topics, this video will help.
Watch Twitter Search in Plain English.
View With CommentsTwitter Search in Plain English
By leelefever on June 16, 2009 - 2:59pm
New Video: Preparing an Emergency Kit in Plain English
By leelefever on May 26, 2009 - 12:11pm
Today we published a new video called "Preparing an Emergency Kit in Plain English." 
This video represents a new kind of relationship for Common Craft. A while back, we were contacted by Public Safety Canada (PSC) about this subject and we saw a couple of opportunities. First, we could work on a video that has the potential to have a positive impact. Second, we saw an opportunity for a win-win in terms of the video's ownership - something we call a hybrid relationship.
Emergency kits are a widely accepted part of emergency preparedness and most agree on what a kit should contain. The opportunity we saw was to work with PSC to create an emergency kit video that would fit their needs and give us an opportunity to offer a similar video for licensing on commoncraft.com. So, PSC received a video built for their Canadian audience and we have a video with versions appropriate for our American audience. We see this as a win-win and enjoyed working with PSC to make it happen.
This video offers governments and organizations focusing on emergency preparedness a quick and effective way to help citizens get started on building their kits. It can be licensed and branded for use in training and education, or on public facing websites.
View With CommentsVideo: World Wide Web in Plain English
World Wide Web in Plain English
By leelefever on April 08, 2009 - 1:37pm
"Bludgeoned into Submission" with a "Jumbled Assault"
By leelefever on March 30, 2009 - 7:39am
Andrew Pegler, plain English writer and editor, is frustrated by the language that dominates business and law. In "Join Winnie's War and Mind Your Language" he has harsh words for what passes as communcation these days:
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