by Kevin Miller

I have been the Chair of the Information & Communication Committee for the past 8 years. Committee members in 2005 were Anita Miller and Jaclyn Vallis.

Triathlon Manitoba uses e-mail, our website, the telephone, our Spring Newsletter, media releases, and paper leaflets to communicate information to our membership and others.

My 2003 and 2004 reports evaluated our seasons' timing and results experience against the Goals, Objectives, and Major Tasks listed in our Game Plan. The parts of this year's Game Plan that pertain to Information & Communication did not change, and for the most part, our actions and experiences also did not change; we were every bit as successful in 2005 as we had been in 2003 and 2004. Therefore, this report will simply note miscellaneous things that were different in 2005.

• Our website now has just under 1200 pages. Anita now makes 85% of the updates.
  
  
• The Triathlon Manitoba E-mail Contact List now has over 1600 addresses. The task of composing and sending the messages was moved from me (Board/volunteer) to Anita (staff) in the spring. 15 messages were sent this year.
  
  
• 17 media releases were written by Jaclyn or Mandy this year.
  
  
• Jaclyn and Anita had some difficulty encouraging members to write items for the spring newsletter, but seven full-page ads were purchased. We couldn't produce a newsletter with more ads than stories, so a great deal of effort was expended producing stories. Couple that with the usual technical and logistical problems of receiving and inserting ads, and we have to wonder whether including ads in the newsletter is really worth it.
  
  
• When we changed office space in the Sport Manitoba building in July, we terminated the Shaw internet (e-mail) account we shared with Swim Manitoba, and we purchased our own. This gave us the opportunity to move our website hosting agreement from MTS to Shaw, and thereby reduce costs each month. Jaclyn and I expended approximately a day of time on this, but it all happened very smoothly, and 98% of our website visitors never noticed the difference.