RUNNING THE BUSINESS

Promoting and publicising Orienteering in Australia

THIS will be my last ‘Running The Business’ column as I have stepped down as Director (Development) to become President of Orienteering Australia. I elected to write one last RTB column rather than start with a new President’s column to enable me to respond to the plethora of suggestions that people have contributed to The Australian Orienteer regarding what Orienteering Australia ought to be doing to promote and publicise Orienteering in Australia. • Firstly, many commentators do not acknowledge that

Australians probably participate in more sports than any other country in the world, thus there are probably more than 200 sports seeking media coverage. In 2005-06, the Australian Sports Commission provided financial support to around 60 sports. So promoting and publicising

Orienteering is not as simple as some people would like it to be, as there are many other sports seeking the same goal and the Olympic and Commonwealth Games sports have an advantage. • Secondly, while our athletes do well in international competitions, there are many Australian world champions across a wide range of sports, so to suggest that we should do more to publicise the achievements of our top performers fails to recognise that in the context of international competitiveness our best often do not rate sufficiently high enough to interest the national media. • Thirdly, whether we like it or not, Orienteering still has an image problem of not being regarded an athletic pursuit.

While this might suit the many recreational orienteers, it does not help Orienteering get media coverage as a mainstream sport. A knowledgeable person recently suggested to me that the general public would probably rate Croquet ahead of Orienteering as a real sport. • Fourthly, many commentators assume that what appears in the media is the extent of the material submitted, without any knowledge of the strategies and tactics that have been employed over the past nine years, and that while their suggestions might have been followed, they have not been successful. The two key rules in dealing with the media are timeliness and being ‘persistent and consistent’. A few other rules are: television networks are not interested in stories that are not supported by high quality vision (ABC-

TV generally prefers its own footage), newspapers like personal quotes and high-resolution action photographs, and national magazines generally have a lead-time of about three months. I could fill the whole 48 pages of The

Australian Orienteer with stories of the things that have worked against us meeting those ‘rules’. • Fifthly, the biggest obstacles to timeliness are the distance that most Orienteering events are staged from media bases (deters media presence at events) and Internet connections, the timely obtaining of official results from event managers, and key people being diverted by other obligations. In regard to the Internet connections, we recently acquired a Minimax modem that connects directly to the Internet via the Telstra CDMA network. We used it for three days (including the Prologue) of the 2006 Australian 3-Days to post material on the OA website and to file results with

AAP, but we still experienced delays in getting official results and we had other duties to perform before we could concentrate on media matters. I haven’t attempted to provide any answers; just to explain that the task is not as simple as some commentators might suggest it is.

Thanks to Event Managers

In commenting on the matter of electronic copies of official results, I want to make it clear that all event managers have been as cooperative as they could possibly be. I also want to record my appreciation of their help over the past nine years. The issue is that a copy of the main file cannot be taken while normal results processing is happening and event managers understandably try to avoid interrupting normal results processing. This is an issue that Orienteering Australia has to solve and we will be looking at options over the coming months.

A vacancy for a Media Officer

As to the future for promoting and publicising Orienteering in Australia, that will be a matter for the new Director (Development), Ben Rattray, to address. I have told Ben that if he wants me to continue with my being the official photographer and media liaison person for Orienteering Australia, I will do so until he can get someone else to take on those roles. So if anybody has the interest, the inclination and the time to take on the task, they should contact Ben Rattray at benrattray@hotmail.com as soon as possible to offer their services.