By Anjela Dukes

Forgive the cliché, but I have good news and I have bad news.

First, I’ll give you the bad news. Each year most of our chapter’s income comes from the membership dues refund that we get from Society. This year the dues refund is drastically reduced. The administrative council, SIG leaders, and the Training and Competition chairs took this reduction into account as we created our chapter’s 2004-2005 Budget.

As a result, we’re making a lot of cuts. For example, our chapter no longer will pay the entry fees and mailing expenses for our local competitions winners to advance to the international competitions. This reduced our competitions budget by approximately $550.00.

We also reduced the amount we set aside for local student chapter presidents to use to attend the national conference. That saved $500.00.

Last year, printing and mailing expenses were $3448.22 — mostly to cover the monthly events bulletin. This year, in addition to repeating that expense, we had to pay three years worth of back sales taxes. To reduce our printing and mailing expenses by $1800.00, we decided to move to an online monthly bulletin, beginning in October. Each month you can be notified through the announcement list that the events bulletin PDF is available. You already should be on the announcement list. If not, please refer to our web site (http://www.stc-carolina.org/resources/lists.shtml).

Now I’ll give you the good news. We hope that our upcoming Tri-Doc conference will be a good source of income for our chapter. We are designing conference tracks to give you the information you need to shape your future as a technical communicator and to drive change in the field. Victoria (Vici) Koster-Lenhardt, the STC Region 2 Director/Sponsor, will be our keynote speaker. Vici’s presentation will address this year’s international conference theme, “Shaping the Future of Technical Communication”!

To be a success, the Tri-Doc 2005 Conference Committee needs motivated volunteers to do the following:

• Pass out special conference promotional items such as calendars, bottled water, and popcorn at STC membership/SIG meetings.
• Investigate promotional opportunities such as meeting with the STC Carolina PR Committee chair, place ads in technical publications, and work with other chapters and area businesses to promote the conference.
• Design the conference program,maps with the locations of presentations,vendors, and sponsors, and a CD that contains all of the presentations for the conference attendee.

If you want to register, volunteer, present,or if you have ideas or suggestions for programs or potential sponsors,please go to the Tri-Doc 2005 Conference website, http://www.stc-carolina.org/conference/TriDoc2005/index.shtml, and find out how to get involved. Everyone that registers to attend the conference during the month of September is eligible to win a Flash Card Memory Reader!

Providing value to our members is what our chapter is all about, regardless of the cost. I hope you find that to be good news.