Date of Award

5-2014

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Departmental Honors

Department

Economics and Finance

Abstract

The policy team at the Charles Koch Institute is broken into different areas of research. During my summer internship, I was assigned to research crony capitalism with four other members of the policy team. Along with their research on crony capitalism, these team members maintained a website called cronychronicles.org. For a definition of crony capitalism, or cronyism, see Appendix C. The goal of the website was to be "the leading online resource for everything related to cronyism" (About Us). I was very interested in the research I was conducting on crony capitalism, and enjoyed contributing information to the Crony Chronicles site, but I felt that that the current template for the website and the information contained in the website kept Charles Koch policy team from achieving their goal for cronychronicles.org. Although Crony Chronicles wanted to be the leading resource for cronyism, their website was structured more like a blog. Furthermore, the information contained in the website, and specifically the new blog posts that were added daily, seemed to appeal only to those who fully understand cronyism and were actively searching for news stories on the topic. In order to be the leading resource on cronyism, I felt the policy team needed to appeal to a wider audience and have a standing website that linked to a blog for reoccurring visitors. I pitched my idea to redesign the website to the policy team, and as a result, I was given the title of project manager over website redesign. In order to redesign the website, I conducted surveys on the current website, researched website design and created a template for an outsourced web designer, and wrote all the content that would be displayed in the new website. I was able to complete all the necessary work for the website to be re-launched on time, but the funding was never secured for the new website.

Download

Share

COinS

Copyright for this work is retained by the student. If you have any questions regarding the inclusion of this work in the Digital Commons, please email us at .

 

Faculty Mentor

Shannon Peterson

Departmental Honors Advisor

Frank Caliendo