Hey, a funny thing happened on the way to the election. As mentioned previously by Lorne Eckersley, a few new forms of communications emerged that I hadn’t seen around before to this extent. The main one was the creation of a Facebook site by a couple local women to be used as a forum for the candidates that chose to use that method of communication, which, for the relatively short period it was active before the election, showed some successes as dialogues on various subjects. It, like every other form of communication in our valley, provided an exchange of information between a certain percentage of the population that were either comfortable with using computers or felt there was some worth to that method. Others perhaps gathered or shared their information through other methods like the newspaper, public forums, mail outs, door-to-door, phone calls and most likely the coffee shop or grocery store.
My last column talked about the way we communicate with you and our changing format with our leisure guide. You should be seeing it in a few weeks, this time in your mailbox, but with the following spring issue out at various places for you to pick up. The rapidly changing environment on information exchange along with rising costs requires constant review as far as marketing and targeting your audience. Whether you are an independent businessperson or, in our case, a service provider, it is a constant struggle to advertise and lure you in to try a product with the first question being, are we getting value for our marketing dollars?
How do you get your information about the things that are important to you? Do you wait for it to arrive on your doorstep or do you go looking for it? We often see people that come in and say they didn’t know about a certain program or course until it was too late, but it is the same regarding events or activities in the community. There are people that say they don’t read the paper or listen to local radio or go downtown to look at the bulletin boards but my question would be, how then do you get your information? Personally, if I am interested in an event, news story, program or the like, I try and use as many of the tools available as possible, such as media, word of mouth, posters or electronic. Are they all perfect? Perhaps not always, but if you seek out multiple sources, you can start to weed things out a bit. Either way, it is ultimately my responsibility to do the legwork.
So, we continue to tweak and try new methods to better serve you as well as encourage new people to try us on for size — hopefully we are reaching you.
Neil Ostafichuk is the recreation supervisor at the Creston and District Community Complex.