Are you one of the nearly 2,000 business students here at DU? What if you could generate personalized business cards to hand out to potential employers?
That’s what the Daniels Pioneer plans to offer through its online student store, danielspioneer.com, while also differentiating the Daniels College of Business from the larger DU community.
Currently, the Daniels Pioneer website provides both students and alumni a limited number of goods and services, including the ability to purchase DCB water bottles, shirts, outerwear and designed backgrounds for computer screens.
However, the website is hoping to expand its selection of DCB gear to include student business cards, T-shirts, laptop stickers and leather portfolios with the DCB name.
To achieve this, the Daniels Pioneer student task force is working to drive traffic to the website in order to meet the demand for these goods.
“The online store and website are a work in progress,” said Charlie Wondergem, a sophomore working on the student task force for the Daniels Pioneer site.
According to Wondergem, the website is intended to foster school spirit and make connections between current students and alumni to fortify the family of Daniels graduates.
While the Daniels Pioneer site is not intended to be as rigid as the official DCB website, www.daniels.du.edu, the goal is for the site to remain relevant, such as Blackboard does for students to receive class assignments and grades.
One proposed option for driving traffic to the website is a reinforcement of a program already running on the site called “Student of the Week.”
These short videos feature business students in both the undergraduate and graduate programs at DCB who are doing something good, have an interesting story or have achieved something through their studies.
Each winner for “Student of the Week” receives a T-shirt and spirit tumbler.
“The idea with the ‘Student of the Week’ is to encourage some friendly competition among students and encourage them to do well,” said Wondergem.
As a work in progress, the Daniels Pioneer site is looking for ways to peak student interest and will begin talking to students in the near future about the things they would like to see done through the online store as well as ways to promote the website.
While Wondergem warns that nothing is currently set in stone, the main goal of the student task force right now is on figuring out how drive traffic to the website while engaging students with one another in their studies.
For example, another proposed event for the Daniels Pioneer may be a “webinar” with the CEO of a corporation. Students would have the ability to watch a seminar given by the CEO and ask questions via an online chat room.
These types of options would not only drive traffic to the website, but provide business students with valuable opportunities to speak with successful business professionals, said Wondergem.
“It will be great if people buy items from the store, but we need them to keep coming back to make it worthwhile,” said Wondergem. “Options such as the webinar provide students with the ability to talk with someone who may not be able to visit campus without leaving the comfort of their own room and slippers.”
