Featured slider character limit change?

Hi,

I'm sure I'm making some silly error somewhere, but the character count on the featured slider on the front page never seems to go above 238 characters.

I have set the character limit to 5000 in Layout -> Listings -> Featured but no actual change on the front page is happening.

Anyway, I must be changing the wrong variable... Where should I change the character limit? Right now it has a large white space below the text (since the image is quite tall) and it looks less than nice.

Thanks.