CYC Home
By Bruce Sherman
CYC Commodore
In case you hadn't noticed, you're hearing from CYC a lot more lately.
The Board of Directors last fall voted to eliminate the Leadline, our club newsletter, to save about $11,000 a year in printing and distribution costs. In its place, however, we have initiated a communications plan that's much more aggressive than the Leadline ever was.
Our website has received a substantial upgrade, thanks to webmaster Derek Storm and designer Jen Hobden. It looks a lot better and there's a lot more information on it, including all of the content you used to see in the Leadline, plus more articles and photos from club activities and races.
We try to keep the site fresh, adding new content every few days. I have been coordinating that, writing some articles myself and getting help from others who are producing timely and interesting articles and photos.
The last couple of weeks, Pegggy Johnson has been providing great reports on the SLAM Center Sound series races. We also are grateful to Cliff Estes of Borrowed Light Images for providing us with photos of our members' boats in those races.
Over the next couple of months, you will be seeing more improvements on the web site. Derek and Jen are coming up with changes that will simplify the site and make navigation easier without reducing the amount of information on the site.
But all the website improvements would be for naught if nobody sees them. To that end, we are sending our members e-newsletters that highlight the fresh material on the web site, include links to that material and aim to drive traffic to the site.
To facilitate distribution of the e-newsletters to our more than 500 members, we are using a web-based system operated by a company called Constant Contact, for which you might have heard radio ads lately. Constant Contact provides newsletter templates, tools for assembling newsletters, and enables us to email our entire membership with a single click, as often as we want, for just $15 a month. A great deal, I think.
(If you haven't received the email newsletter and want to, please email me at sherman.b@comcast.net.)
Improving communications with members helps us build our sense of community at CYC. Also helping in that regard, we hope, will be new social events being planned, additional educational programs, and our continuing effort to ramp up our culture of volunteering for the club.
Please email me at the above address is you have any comments on our communications efforts or would like to submit articles or photos for the web site. And most of all, I hope you will visit the site on a regular basis to keep up with what's happening at CYC and join in our activities.