State Universities can only expect the State of CA to provide about two thirds of the revenue necessary to finance the operations of the California State University system. Donors must provide the balance. The College of Business Administration has faculty scattered in six different buildings. In order to construct a business building that would house the CBA will require millions of donor dollars. To reach these potential donors requires a systematic effort. A database of all businesses in the Southern California region was searched using the geographical location of within 25 miles of Cal Poly Pomona. This generated a list of nearly 5000 names. This database was again searched using the criteria of annual sales of at least $5M. This generated 152 businesses within the targeted geographical area. The Excel database was first converted to DB 4. Using ArcView GIS with the Street Map Extension resulted in plotting 92 of these businesses with the sizes of dots representing their annual sales. Many of those not plotted had PO Boxes for addresses which cannot be plotted. By clicking on the map one can get exact directions from Cal Poly Pomona to the identified business. All of the information contained in the database is linked to the map location. This includes the Chief Executive Officers, their phone, fax, and email addresses and products manufactured. The faculty of the College of Business Administration now have ready access to all of the public information about these potential donors. The next step is to start a relationship between Cal Poly Pomona and the potential donors by offering our students as interns in these specific companies.

The College of Business Administration mission statement is "to provide quality undergraduate and graduate management education for a diverse student population." We do this in many different ways. Students in the College of Business are expected to have hands on training to prepare them for professional positions upon graduation in the tradition of Cal Poly Pomona’s philosophy of "learning by doing." One of the ways this training has historically been provided is to require students to take at least 4 Units of Internship credit during their last three quarters at Cal Poly Pomona. What this has done for many students is to provide them an entrance to a position in a reputable company. If the student does a good job, chances are that the student will be offered a permanent position upon graduation.

For many years one of the authors was the Internship Coordinator for the International Business and Marketing Department. During that time the author placed many students in internships with Xerox, IBM, Carnation, and companies of similar stature. These interns became full time employees, then were promoted to management positions and are now senior managers in companies across the US. It is a "win-win" situation for the students and for the employers. Students earn enough money to pay their fees, tuition, and books and are able to stay in school to graduate on time. Businesses get our best students even before they graduate and can "cherry pick" from among the best students.

Every year the College of Business graduates approximately 1,000 students, many of whom take positions in the local area. Local businesses have the advantages of our well educated students to help them make their businesses succeed and grow. They have to invest little time and effort in training Cal Poly Pomona graduates, at least as compared to individuals who have not graduated from college. Money not spent on training employees could be available in the form of donations to the CBA for the many needs of the college including upgrading the physical and technological infrastructure. While we are doing an excellent job in the college, there are some conditions which hinder us from achieving even greater success.

The College of Business Administration is burdened by the lack of space for all of the faculty and staff in one building. We have faculty scattered throughout six different buildings. This hampers collaboration on research projects, hinders collegiality, and fosters the sense among the faculty that they are not important enough to the campus community to have a building to call home. The Dean of the College of Business Administration, Dr. Eduardo Ochoa has positioned himself as the champion of a new building for the College of Business Administration, whether it is a renovated Building 1 or an entirely new complex. The cost is between $30M and $50M depending upon which site is chosen. There are matching funds available from several sources, but the College of Business Administration will have to raise at least half of this money. This is not an easy task. One author decided to see if there was any way the faculty could help.

The use of personal computers is at an all time high for all kinds of productive activities. Many fine software programs have been developed to assist researchers in some of the more mundane aspects of research—manipulating data. Geographic Information Systems is one of those software packages which has multiple applicability to a host of different problems for a variety of dissimilar fields.

The potential uses of GIS in Business are too vast to be enumerated. Most businesses must know who their target market is for their particular business. The target market is those individuals who have the desire and money to purchase what a particular business vendor has for sale, regardless of whether it is a service, such as a legal service, a product, such as an automobile, or a combination of both such as an airline ticket.

One of the biggest problems business owners face is how to reach their specific target market both effectively and efficiently. Most business owners do not have unlimited money for advertising and promotion expenditures and hence must try to spend scarce dollars in a way so as to optimize the outcome—sales of goods and services. Using GIS and census data allows business owners to target specific individuals with specific demographic characteristics who are in the market to purchase their goods and services.

The same need is present for the CBA to locate its target market of potential local business donors. The Thomas Regional Directory Company has both a database downloadable by specific characteristics, as well as a hard copy in our Library. The cost to purchase this database is $595.00. Our target market is part of Los Angeles, Orange, and San Bernardino counties—those within a 25 mile radius of Cal Poly Pomona. We targeted businesses which have at least 10 employees or more and $500,000 or more in annual sales. Businesses smaller than this are unlikely to be able to donate on any regular basis. In addition we needed the name of the owner or CEO, the Standard Industrial Classification code (which tells us the primary type of business), the phone number, the fax number, web address, email address, the street address, city, and zip code. However, upon contacting the University Advancement office it was discovered that we already owned the necessary database.

University Advancement officials cannot just "cold call" these business owners and ask them to donate money to Cal Poly Pomona. The results would be less than stellar. What we have to do is to use good Marketing techniques by building a relationship with the potential donor. This is called Relationship Marketing. One of the best ways to do that is to offer something of value to the business first—a student intern. Senior level students are bright, articulate, and enthusiastic. The student gets a decent paying job, obtains internship credit of 2 Units for each 20 hours per week worked, perhaps finds a professional permanent job in the process, the business gets the benefit of the student while an intern, and this starts the relationship with Cal Poly Pomona. Eventually, the business owner will be invited to a Founder’s Day Dinner to meet similar business owners and be invited to become a Cal Poly Pomona Supporter. One could start with 50 businesses and continue until all of the businesses, which have been located in the database have been contacted.

This provides students with meaningful jobs which may lead to a career, help students finance their way through college, give students "hands on training" in the Cal Poly Pomona tradition, and gets an entrance into these local businesses for potential fund raising activities. These are all "win-win" situations.

When one mentions fund raising to faculty, the tendency is to say that it is "somebody else’s job, not mine." Few faculty outside the International Business and Marketing Department have sufficient marketing expertise to see fund raising as an extension of the teaching/learning process, the process of teaching business owners the value of investing in the education of students attending Cal Poly Pomona. Then there is the faculty perception of fund raising as a mountain which cannot be scaled. It looks like an overwhelming task. Where does one begin? One of the beauties of the GIS ArcView program with Street Map extension is that it allows one to break down the mountain into "shovel full’s" that one or a few faculty can handle. If each Department in the College of Business (six) only took ten names from the resulting list of 152 names that would be 60 companies which could be contacted and perhaps lunch arranged between the business owner and the faculty member to begin the relationship with Cal Poly Pomona.

One author registered for and took a Seminar in Geographic Information Systems in the summer of 1998, and registered for and took the Advanced Seminar in Geographic Information Systems in the summer of 1999. The project was to locate and plot these potential donors to the College of Business using GIS Arcview software available in the GIS lab. The Advancement Division of the University provided a disk with information on all the businesses in Southern California. This was in Excel format. The database was searched for the companies with $5M or more in annual sales using the rationale that smaller companies would not likely be potential donors. This generated a list of 152 potential donors. The authors converted the database to dbIV format, used GIS Arcview with the StreetMap extension, and geo-coded the potential donors on the street data within a 25 mile radius of Cal Poly Pomona. These companies are more likely to already be familiar with Cal Poly Pomona (Figure 1). It is highly likely that they would be hiring our graduates anyway. Seventy-two companies were plotted and by clicking on a point on the map, all of the available information on these companies appears on the screen (Figure 2). This gives us full contact information, such as, CEO, CIO, Site Manager, phone and fax numbers, email addresses, products/service produced, etc. Of course the database also has the full information on the entire 152 companies.

This system makes it easy for faculty to get all the relevant information they need to approach potential donors without having to go or look anywhere else. This time saving feature cannot be minimized. The mountain has been "broken down" and the companies are just waiting there to be contacted. It is a "one stop shopping center." The computerized database with street map function, even makes it easy to get driving instructions from Cal Poly Pomona to the front door of the company. Furthermore, this system allows easy tracking of who has been and who has not been contacted, so that only one faculty member is contacting a particular business. It would be easy to add a few columns to track the results of the fund raising efforts by month or year. The visual reminder via the large map of the area surrounding Cal Poly Pomona keeps faculty aware of the number of potential donors who are out there ready to be contacted.

Data sources for this project include The Thomas Regional Company Directory and the StreetMap data from Esri. Businesses with more than $5M annual sales and within a 25 mile radius of Cal Poly Pomona were selected from the business database. A total of 152 businesses matched the criteria. About 40 of the 152 were further dropped out of the database because P. O. Boxes were used as the business addresses which could not be geo-coded. Street data covering the area of the 25-mile radius of Cal Poly Pomona were extracted from the StreetMap data. After a U.S. street style (without zip codes) geo-coding index was built on the extracted data, a geo-coding process was conducted to match the 112 businesses based on their addresses. The process matched 92 businesses with an 82% matching rate.

A point shapefile then was created based on the 92 matched businesses with all the attribute data included. Both printed and interactive maps were produced to show the donors' distribution. The maps were produced with graduated circles with circle size proportional to annual sales (Figure 1). The information for individual businesses can be accessed by the identity tool (Figure 2) on the interactive version of the map. Travel distance and direction can also be derived with the best route function of the network analyst (Figure 3).

The fundraising GIS not only provides the donors' information, distribution, and direction for road access, but also provides an organizational tool of the fundraising within the College of Business Administration. Avenue script with a customized interface can be created to allow faculty members to enter progress information without the need of ArcView technical training.

The resulting computerized map with identified donors can be placed on the College of Business Administration Exchange Server so that faculty and administrators can access it without walking over to the GIS laboratory. This simplifies even more the ease of use and availability of the data, as well as the ability to print out maps from Cal Poly Pomona to the various companies. A CA Lottery Grant of $22,000.00 was obtained by one of the authors to begin implementation of this fund raising activity in Fall quarter, 2000. It will be at least a year before we will know if the concept of using GIS ARCVIEW with the Street Map Extension results in more donations to the College of Business Administration.

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Donna Tillman, Ph.D.
Professor, International Business and Marketing
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

Lin Wu,. Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Geography and Anthropology
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona