Barner/Teodorovich/Terkelsen/Webman 1

Barner/Teodorovich/Terkelsen/Webman 1

Caitlin Barner, Elena Teodorovich, Mary Terkelsen, Nikki Webman

MIS Honors Showcase

Professor Neumann

17 December 2014

Our Video Introduction (on YouTube):

UknowitAll Business Plan

UknowitAll, Avoid Major F.O.M.O.; an app by Caitlin Barner, Elena Teodorovich, Mary Terkelsen, and Nikki Webman. As freshmen coming into a large university of over 40,000 students, we find ourselves wanting to connect with others and get involved on campus. Countless flyers and posters pop up promoting fun, free events, however these numerous events are easy to forget. With so many amazing opportunities being offered and no way to organize them all, it is easy to get overwhelmed. We proposeUknowitAll, an app that will provide students at the University of Arizona with information ofall theevents happening on-campus. Events will be organized into categories: entertainment, social, sports, educational, and etc. These categories can be easily navigated amongst. A student can add events of interest to their personal calendars with the press of a button.UknowitAllwillevenoffer a sync with Google Calendar and Facebook. Students can search and find engaging events viaUknowitAll, which will then transfer them to that event’s page on Facebook. This way, users can see which of their Facebook friends were also going and even invite more friends. If students already use Google Calendar for their other events, they could syncUknowitAllwith that. The app’s settings will allow students to get notifications of these events. Updates will remind each student of upcoming events and notify attendees if an event was cancelled or postponed. Now, instead of checking thousands of social media sites and arbitrary posters around campus, there will be one centrally located hotspot on everyone’s phone.

UknowitAll was a group effort, however each of us contributed to a certain aspects of getting the app ready for the showcase. Caitlin Barner focused on the aesthetics of the poster board; she took charge of the physical presentation. Caitlin organized the poster so that people coming by our table would able to quickly understand what the app was all about. Elena Teodorovich was in charge of the marketing aspect of the project. Elena came up with the slogan (Avoid Major FOMO) and the design of the app name (UknowitAll). Nikki Webman came up with the app faces; designed the way the app would look and how we could make it user friendly. Last, but not least, Mary Terkelsen came up with the features of the app. The features explained what each app face did for the UknowitAll app. Altogether we were able to make UknowitAll a success. We got only positive feedback from the people at the freshman showcase, which showed us that we all worked hard and worked well as a team.

UknowitAll, came from our personal experiences. All of us are freshman, and along with other new comers, we have found that one of the hardest parts of coming into a new school is figuring out what clubs to get involved in. UknowitAll is a simple solution for any UA student; a freshman just coming in or even a senior still trying to figure out their passions. UknowitAll is an app that helps organize your time, notify you of upcoming events, and gets you connected with the rest of the university. Our mission is to essentially have everyone “know it all” with UknowitAll! This app has endless opportunities; UknowitAll was made for the average UA student but the app is completely applicable to any college. We know that UknowitAll is an amazing idea that any student will find useful.

UknowitAll is the perfect app for any student looking to get involved on their college campus. Because the Internet and phones are a huge part of our lives today, UknowitAll would improve the way in which we communicate in person. By keeping ourselves organized, involved, and holding ourselves accountable, us students are able to easily contribute to their university community though this app. It is human nature to have this innate fear that we’ve missed out on something, whether it is a cool climbing wall outside our residence hall, or a petting zoo on the mall; we can’t stand to see a fun opportunity go to waste. Everyday, there are hundreds of eye-catching flyers posted throughout our daily student territories, but we never truly take the time to jot down cool events we are interested in. Therefore, UknowitAll would help eliminate the fear of missing out (FOMO, as the students call it), by allowing students to pursue the many opportunities clubs, sports teams, social organizations, and other programs here at the University of Arizona, have to offer, and stay organized while doing so. After downloading the free UknowitAll app, the user may create an account and filter through their interests. For example, as a pre-business honors freshman, I might want to click on ELITE as one of my clubs and affiliations to view upcoming events and meetings. The great thing about UknowitAll is that even if you are not involved in a club and are interested but unsure about how to get involved, you can still check out their events and attend in the hopes that the organization will spark your interest. Attending cool events, guest lectures, and fundraisers will not only improve your involvement at the University of Arizona, but it may also encourage you to pursue interests you never have before, giving you great opportunities to potentially grow as an individual. After filtering through the organizations, the user can browse through the many different events each group has to offer. After selecting the ones that seem fun and exciting, they can then enter them into the calendar component of the app. This monthly calendar will display all the events coming up that month, with their date, time, location, and any other miscellaneous information essential to the user’s attendance. With the ability to export these events to an iCal, Google Calendar, or whatever form of digital organization they use, students can remain organized and be more motivated to attend the events they signed up for. Another awesome feature of UknowitAll is its sharing interfaces: if students want to invite friends, faculty, or even family to one of their events they are attending, they can create a Facebook event, share it on Google, or blog about it on Instagram or Twitter, where it will link back up to UknowitAll so other students can be encouraged to sign up as well. With all the sharing these days, we also thought a great component of the application would be a system of providing feedback post-event to assist clubs in improving upon what they are already doing. As a team, we feel strongly that every student should have the ability to take full advantage of the many unique and awesome events occurring throughout the year all over campus. This app could be a way to keep us on our phones in a good way: saying connected as a student body while broadening our perspectives of the world through pursuing our interests and trying new things. So many students want to get involved; they just do not know how. UknowitAll is the best app system to figure out what works for you here at the U of A.

UknowitAll, couldbe a huge success. It is true that university students want to get involved and it is true that when university students first come in thy are clueless as to what to join. Although these are strong and valid point, there is another major benefactor to the app; the benefit is buffing up your resume. We come to college to learn and to get started on our future careers. It is important that when you come to college, you get involved and take part in the internships, clubs, and activities they have so that once you go out to the real world you will be well prepared. With the UknowitAll app, you will be able to gain experiences and traits that will later help with your career. No matter what the club, activity, or event is, you will gain leadership, teamwork, and other useful skills. Thus we say the UknowitAll app will help“fill up” that resume of yours.

As college students, we are still learning how to handle our money, especially as freshman. Therefore, by the end of the week, a lot of us feel broke: out of money, tired, and looking for some kind of activity to relieve the stress of a tough week. That is why we made this app free. We understand that some students may pay $.99 to use this app, however, it would be much more applicable and accessible if it was made free. The idea of UknowitAll is to promote university camaraderie and to stay connected through one interface, not many students, both undergraduate and graduate, using multiple resources to achieve the same results. We find that if this mobile application is free, not only will more students download it, but they will be further inspired to use it to the best of its abilities.

UknowitAll is targeted to all students at the University of Arizona. Freshman specifically can benefit from this app because they are looking to meet lots of new people and find organizations that fit their interests. Because the app organizes events by category of interest, students can use UknowitAll to explore events that fit with their major, religion, or hobbies. Freshmen are typically less aware of activities on campus and thus could benefit the most. The concept behind UknowitAll can be taken to any college campus nationwide with a different name. All colleges loaded with a variety of events and an interface that organizes them all and makes them accessible can be helpful to its students.

Whilst presenting our business proposal at the 2014 MIS Honors Showcase, we experienced some competition. Our peers created many different products that would benefit the University of Arizona. As people voted on the best proposals, it was clear that all the ideas would be competing for funding. Many groups also chose to create mobile apps, which made our product less unique. UknowitAll has a competitive advantage because it aims to improve the social life and academic engagement of students. Many other groups focused on food, sports, transportation, and campus safety. UknowitAll had further competitive edge through effective pitches and creative presentation at the showcase.

With every successful product comes a successful marketing plan. Publicizing UknowitAll will take four basic steps that could potentially skyrocket our notability around campus. Our first step is to create a goal. Our first goal to be reached will be to make our app well known around campus with a positive reputation. As UknowitAll becomes more and more popular we see expanding its use to different college campuses all around America. The second step is to devise a plan, which is to promote our app first to University of Arizona students through advertising on the UA Mall, through word of mouth, and reaching out to various clubs and organizations. The more people hear about UknowitAll, the better. The third step in the marketing plan is knowing the challenges ahead. These challenges may present themselves in the form of competing apps or simply students who oppose the idea of UknowitAll and attempt to give it a bad reputation. Along with these challenges, may come problems with the actual program. There may be a period of time when we will have to work out a few kinks in the system, which may slow down the process of getting the app on its feet, but we are ready to overcome these challenges. The fourth and final step to our marketing pan is to create a timeline. The timeline foreseen for this project as a whole (including getting the name out there) will be around three months. Spreading the word of this app throughout America and making it popular on other campuses, however will take a bit longer. We see that part of the process taking approximately one year.

In addition, the organization we would like to use is school itself. With the help of the club board of directors, we would be able to make UknowitAll available to students quickly. On the University of Arizona app, we will have UknowitAll added to the list of options you see on the home menu. As we said before, UknowitAll is accessible to any college around the world, but in the future when we plan to expand we will have to change the name and therefore change the organization we start it with.

As stated previously, we plan to take UknowitAll to the next level by making it available to other college campuses around America; not only at the University of Arizona. This will take a lot of time and planning but we believe this app will have a big enough impact on our college community that spreading it throughout other campuses will not be as difficult as foreseen. Along with expanding our app to different locations, we will be making adjustments to UknowitAll as seen necessary. Our team is aware that there is always room for improvement, so we are open to new ideas to be submitted to us in order to make UknowitAll a better overall product for the user. One idea we have in mind already is to add a built in “Rate my Professor” page specific to the UA (or whatever campus it may spread to). The rate my professor part of the app will be automatically linked to all of the classes that the specific professor teaches, which will make scheduling classes easier than ever! UknowitAll is a truly unique app that we only see becoming more popular with college students everywhere.

We believe the UknowitAll app will improve everyone on campus. There are people well off into their college education who still have not found their place. The best feeling is finding that get away place (club or activity) to go to when you are not dealing with homework. UknowitAll will truly make the lives of everyone easier. It will be a lift off the shoulder to know that if you really want it, you can just go on the app to search for it. Whatever activity or event you are interested in, UA has it. Now the only thing keeping you from your involvement at school is a click of a button.