Starting during Orientation, notebooks have been given away
on the Quarter Mile and in the SAU as part of an initiative
spearheaded by Director of Orientation Shawna Lusk. Instead of using
their budget to purchase other (perhaps less useful) items,
the Department of Student Affairs purchased a total of 10,000
notebooks from a company called All By Students (ABS).
ABS was founded in late 2006 by Avi Steinberg and Alejandro
Bremer, two students from the Kellogg School of Management
at Northwestern University. According to Daniel Martz,
CEO of ABS, after noticing all of the impractical promotional
items — such as cups and lanyards — that schools distribute,
the founders of ABS thought, “There has to be a better
way of [spending the money] that might have been wasted
on items that would just become clutter.” The pair decided
to give the students a product that they could actually use
while retaining the school’s branding. “We then realized: Everyone
carries around a notebook.”
The notebooks are designed to reflect the brand of the school
purchasing them - usually by adopting their colors and logo.
The first eight pages are reserved for college-specific information
such as campus maps, important telephone numbers,
and academic calendars. The RIT notebooks contain pictures
of and messages from various student leaders on campus, including
Student Government President Ed Wolf and Reporter’s
Editor in Chief Laura Mandanas. “We are putting the information
which is usually printed on flyers or found on a website
at the students’ fingertips,” explained Martz.
The notebooks also contain student-friendly advertisements,
used as dividers between each section. “We, as a grassroots
student initiative, are careful to [choose] and filter the sponsors,”
stated Martz. Past advertisers include AT&T, General
Mills, Rock the Vote, and the NBA. ABS also attempts to
include sponsors that will offer coupons and discounts to
students.
ABS has come a long way since their very first distribution
of their “Shadow Notebooks” at Northwestern in early 2007.
They changed their product’s name to “ABS Notebooks” and
started serving many other schools including the University
of Maryland, Columbia, and MIT. Now, about 1.1 million
students on 110 different campuses across the United States
use their notebooks.
At the time of writing, Student Government still had several
dozen notebooks to give out for free in their office, located in
the SAU RITreat.
