by Kevin Miller

I have been the Chair of the Information & Communication Committee for the past 9 years. Committee members in 2006 were Anita Miller and Jaclyn Vallis.

Triathlon Manitoba uses e-mail, our website (almost 100,000 hits in the past year), the telephone, our Spring Newsletter, E-mail Contact List messages (13 in the past year), media releases (19 in the past year), and paper leaflets to communicate information to our membership and others.

2006 was another status quo year because I don't intend to make changes to procedures that are working well, so this report will note the one and only thing that was slightly different in 2006 than in previous years:

• In 2005, the Spring Newsletter was 22 pages long, but seven of those pages were advertising. Jaclyn and Anita experienced the usual technical and logistical problems of receiving and inserting ads, so we decided that including ads in the newsletter wasn't really worth it. So, the 2006 newsletter was 15 pages of informative and entertaining items, and one complimentary full-page ad for our major sponsor, Murray Chevrolet. 

Three miscellaneous comments:

• I strongly believe that our members' results at all out-of-province races should be showcased on our website, especially at national and international races. However, it was getting to be a pain to keep track of all those out-of-province race dates, and then to actually locate the results, so I asked the MNTC Director, Elite High Performance Director, and Age Group High Performance Director to give Anita a Heads Up about some of those races. This worked very well during the last half of 2006. "Thank you" to the people who contacted Anita.
  
• Because of a lack of time and initiative, I'm having difficulty writing good Headline Photo Story items, so we tend to run each story longer, and I often don't enjoy the task of putting together a story. At our August Board Meeting I mentioned this. Other Directors suggested that I contact them to write a particular story, and some Directors also promised to contact me with ideas. A few stories have resulted from this, and I'm hoping to use this strategy often in the future. 
  
• Our website is based on 10-year-old technology, but it still works well. Anita is extremely productive updating it, and it's the content of a website that is really the important thing. Besides, if it isn't broken, don't fix it.