Three Day Weekend!

It was a very productive day after a three day weekend! Last week I started working on a flyer to publicize the opportunities ASU has for vendors to get involved, but I finalized it today! I am happy with the way it turned out. It outlines the main Welcome Zone event, and lists the benefits of participating. It also explains a statistic from the National Retail Federation, that the average college student's family will spend just over 600 dollars during the "back to college" time of year. This comes from new electronics, clothes and other apparel, furnishings, school supplies, and necessities. For the ASU student population that adds up to more than 8 million dollars of retail sales. One of the messages we try to get across to vendors is that we want to try to capture as much of these retail sales locally as we can. After I finalized the flyer I put some vendor packets together that included a generic marketing piece that ASU uses that has stats on the student population, the flyer I created, and the business card of my supervisor. Friday, my supervisor and I plan to go the Tempe Marketplace and start distributing these packets by talking to managers of different vendors. We will eventually get to multiple areas around each of the four campuses.

Also today, I visited the Polytechnic campus. This was my last campus visit...and probably the most interesting! The campus is definitely not a traditional college campus, because it was actually an old military base that was converted into an ASU campus. There is a lot of construction projects happening, but currently it still has a military base feel. All the original military-base housing is still on site and is now considered university housing that students live in. They hope to preserve some of the buildings so that the historical value of the old base can live on.

For the rest of the week I have some more vendor meetings with Wal-Mart and Swift Charities and will continue reasearch on vendors in the area.