Although there are 6,000 Jewish students at University Park in Pennsylvania, three Penn State seniors felt that it was not easy to connect with them. So they came up with an innovative solution, and now they just need to persuade investors to believe in its potential.
Seniors Allison Konners, Hunter Most and Hannah Goldberg are hoping to develop WhoJewKnow, a social media app for Jewish students to connect with each other and with Jewish organizations on college campuses.
The students’ vision for the app will feature four tabs: a calendar that keeps abreast of Jewish and community events; a trading post along the lines of Craigslist for a virtual marketplace; a travel feature for ride shares and Birthright trips; and a Jewish geography section, which would visually depict how users are connected to each other.
They told the Centre Daily that the planned app will act like a hub of opportunities for Jewish college students.
But they must find a way to raise the money to develop it for a fall 2015 launch at Penn State, as well as to expand it to college campuses across the United States. Their defined goal is to raise $100,000 by February.
“There’s no social media app for college Jewish students, so why not use smartphones as vehicles or the middle ground to connect students?” Konners suggested. “A year ago and until a month ago this was just an idea on paper.”
That imperfect reality changed when they learned about a “Shark Tank”-style competition facilitated by Aish HaTorah, a worldwide network of Jewish educational centers, with an office in Stamford, Conn. They earned $30,000 when they made a presentation of the idea at the competition in November.
“The big problem has always been, ‘How do we make this happen?’ ” Goldberg noted. “We needed resources and monetary support, and once we got some funding we were really encouraged that we could make it happen.”
After their cash infusion in Connecticut, the three college seniors had meetings with investors from New York City to Florida. They are also preparing to crowd-fund before the end of this month on kickstarter.com or jewcer.com.
“We’re looking for an app developer, a graphic designer, a marketing person, a university relations person,” Konners said regarding their hoped-for expansion, “and we’ll be finding those people in the next two months hopefully.”
The students developed the concept of WhoJewKnow at about the same time that they founded Aish Penn State in August 2013, an organization devoted to the spiritual needs of Jewish Penn State students. Aish Penn has grown from three to 300 members in 16 months.
“This app makes it easier for Jewish college students to find these organizations to be a part of them, and that way involvement in those organizations grows exponentially,” Most enthused.
The three forward thinking young adults also want to expand the app to other universities in 2016, as they have received expressions of interest from Jewish college students as far away as California and Florida.
“Hopefully, it would kind of market itself like Twitter or Facebook, because they grew because of word of mouth,” Konners projected. “Hopefully, people will start to talk about it with friends and it reaches everyone that would want to use this.”
