by Kevin Miller

As Chair of this Committee, my duties can be broken down into four sub-areas:

• Race Line
• Website / E-mail
• Spring Newsletter
• Miscellaneous information tasks

Committee members were Sandy Klassen, Anita Miller, and Carina Rondeau.

Race Line

This was the seventh year that I administered it. For five months each year (May to September), my second phone line serves as Triathlon Manitoba's Race Line. Nothing about it changed for 2001, and its importance again lessened because of our website.  It was used mostly by Kids of Steel participants to pre-register for races and to get a last-minute update on race mornings.

Website / E-mail

My 1999 AGM Report went into great detail about my goals for our website, and my 2000 AGM Report noted some fairly major changes and evolution last year. I won't repeat that information here because my goals remain the same, and we were just as successful meeting the goals again this year.  Although we continued to evolve, we did not make any major procedural, organizational, or visual changes this year.

Comments:

• We continued to maintain the website almost daily.  "Accurate, relevant, and up-to-date information" continues to be our website's strongest attribute.  This takes a lot of effort, but the many positive comments that we have received about this from our members definitely makes it all worthwhile.
• One new initiative for 2001 was my creation of a website page of logos that are optimized for print applications and optimized for website pages.  See http://www.triathlon.mb.ca/logos.htm .
• The "Triathlon Manitoba E-mail Contact List" continues to grow --- it currently has 460 e-mail addresses, and we used the list approximately ten times between late April and late September.  Many "thanks for the info" replies were received, and only a couple of people ask to be removed from the list after each e-mail-out.
• Our website saved us even more money in 2001 because more people have internet access, and we moved more administrative communications onto the website or the Contact List.

The year's biggest change was Pangea's purchase by MTS, so we were forced to endure an e-mail migration in late May and a website migration in mid August. The e-mail migration went quite well: I communicated with MTS, then communicated all the changes and new info to our staff.  The website migration was not so smooth because, in mid July, Pangea accidentally deleted the website. Unfortunately, I was in Edmonton at Worlds at the time.  I had a borrowed notebook computer, but the only current backup of the website was on my home computer.  Pangea restored the website from a one-month old backup, but I couldn't bring it completely up-to-date until I got home a week later.  The net result of the migration to MTS was the addition of Mike Klatt to our corporate e-mail account, and greatly increased connect-time and website-space allowances, but at an annual cost increase of near 50%.

In summary, the Triathlon Manitoba website continues to serve our membership very well, it continues to slowly evolve, and an increasing percentage of its maintenance is done Triathlon Manitoba staff (Anita).

Spring Newsletter

Carina Rondeau gathered a number of stories, as did Jaclyn, Anita, and I.  There were two "firsts" in 2001:

• Anita published the newsletter.  This was a satisfying task for her, and it enabled Jaclyn and Anita to control the production timeline of the newsletter.
• The newsletter was distributed by posting it to our website, then using the E-mail Contact List to inform everyone that it had been posted.  Only members without known e-mail addresses were mailed a paper copy, although all members had the option of requesting one --- nobody did.  The net result was a 50% reduction in the number of newsletters printed (from 1000 to 500), and a reduction of paper mail-outs from "many hundreds" to "a few dozen".  One unexpected advantage of reading the newsletter online that was expressed by a number of people was that color photos could actually be seen in color.

I believe that our Spring 2001 Newsletter was an excellent publication that served us well.

Miscellaneous information tasks

• Anita and I calculated Grand Prix, Sprint, Duathlon, and Kids of Steel race series points again this year.
• I have consulted with and provided data to Jaclyn, David, Marc, and others on an ad-hoc basis.
• I managed all of the data for the Junior Development Team.