The Communications Working Group is led by Airedale Athletics and chaired by Quentin Lewis (Baildon Runners). Its current activities are as follows:
Raising the sport’s profile and communicating more effectively with interested parties by:
- Writing “Running Log” columns twice weekly in the Telegraph & Argus local daily newspaper, and working with the paper’s staff to generate feature articles. This also includes supplying regular updates to the England Athletics website.
- Training club volunteers to write press releases. In particular, we wish to increase the team of correspondents to five or six, working on two-monthly cycles of duty.
- Improving access to information, events and local clubs for athletics participants. This includes working with the Recruitment team to generate updates of leaflets aimed at Adults, Youths, and Network Partners; and it involves developing a website and other electronic means of communications.
- The expected numbers of beneficiaries during the current year are: over 81,000 audited readers of the T&A plus the visitors to the various websites, and 5 volunteers will benefit from the training in PR.
The England Athletics subsidy this year for these activities is £1000. Additionally the group receives support worth £42700 from the Newsquest group (owners of the Telegraph & Argus) through the guaranteed bi-weekly columns. The group expects to commit 325 hours of volunteer time on these projects.