Outside Applications

Being a student of economic study I can’t help myself but to try and apply the teachings of and spreading the good word of economics to the less informed. With that being said in our advanced business & technical writing class we are reworking the new member presentation of a local business group, The Colorado Springs Convention Visitor’s Bureau (CSCVB). The current design of the presentation revolves around a variety of unfocused materials; new member benefits, a variety of broad information dissemination, the roles within the CSCVB both in relation to the new members and in other aspects, a potentially profitable lead program, how the CSCVB markets themselves and the city of Colorado Springs and quite a bit of information regarding their operational practices. The presentation is a mish mash of materials that have been compiled over the years and has lost focus and direction and gained considerable mass. The CSCVB has ‘hired’ our tech writing class to rework the presentation and documentation for new members at our discretion. Enter the logic of collective action!

Our document design team was looking for a common direction and after a 10 minute mini-presentation by me on the teachings of Mancur Olson to the classroom and tech writing teacher our team opted to streamline the presentation to focus on the selective incentives that the CSCVB offers to its members. In order to maintain the integrity of the other informational material from the original presentation everything that we decided would be of minimal direct interest to new members is being transformed into an informational document that could be referenced at the new member’s convenience.

What’s the point? The point is that the elegantly simple logic that Olson as presented in The Logic of collective action is transferable and easily consumed by the non-economist. We learn economics by practicing economics. Now we’ll see what the CSCVB thinks when we present them the new streamlined presentation and document format to them. I’ve been volunteered to do the presentation along with my mini-economics lesson. I’ll update the blog later in the semester in the presentation and see how this leap of logic goes.