1. Group member Rodney will contact local Web Design students for creating and designing our app. We will be receiving assistance from Alex Hamilton (Computer Science major and app developer of LOOP) for our actual app design. To keep up with the analytics and subscriber usage we will be assisted by Thomas Roth Gray (Communication & Media Arts major and Cornett associate).

 

2.  Contact sponsors for our initial budget. Our group member Yas will contact sponsors to help manage our budget plan. She will first apply for a small business grant through the U.S. SBA (Small Business Administration) under the U.S. Department of Education’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. Yas will also apply for funding using Kentucky Small Business Credit Initiative, to help finance additional resources used for the company. 

 

3. Find, train and employ student tutors, will be managed by group member Cassidy. To find student tutors for our app, she will put posters around campus promoting student tutor positions available for upper level UK students. She will focus primarily around major areas students visit on campus, such as Whitehall, Grehan, Gatton, and the W.T. Young Library. She will also make online job advertisements on several websites online. We will contact University leaders to get our promotions on the UK job website. We will also promote that we're hiring on local job sites and our social media.

 

4. Discuss the rights to notes/exams/other content with UK. Our group member Alex will correspond with university officials and professors to determine who owns the notes/exams/presentations/etc. However, if the notes and presentations are produced by students, then this step will not need to occur. If a professor decides not to donate his own notes/presentations for use in our app, then his/her class will not be fully supported (Tutors may still be available). 

 

5. Group member Corey will do the promotion and media for our app. For our app, we will focus heavily on social media. Along with social media, our group will do on campus events at K-Week, and throughout the semester; whether it’s a group study or setting up a review session for a class run by tutors. Corey will contact Cornett Marketing and Advertising Agency because it is a Lexington based company that has the University of Kentucky currently as their client. We want to create a relationship with Cornett through the University of Kentucky to promote academics for our school. Yas will contact the Chief Growth Officer, Emmy Hartley by email, emmy@teamcornett.com, and describe what our idea is and how we can create innovative ways to advertise GroupStudy on campus. Our budget to work with Cornett will be about $5,000 to work on a small ad campaign.

 

5. Launch the app by the beginning of Fall semester, August 2016. Our group will contact Alex Hamilton again to help launch our app and target our audience.

 

 

Milestones:

Our first milestone is to establish a business model. Our business model consists of following our action plan and fulfill each step we want to accomplish. Another milestone we hope to reach is maintaining customer loyalty with our app users. We want to provide all the correct information and collaborate with tutors to receive the best help with schoolwork.