History
Back in 2006 while an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis, our founder discovered that finding an off campus apartment was much harder than it should be. Seeing an opportunity to help other students (and himself!), he launched MovingOffCampus.com (“MOC”) to make finding an off campus apartment as easy as possible for college students.
From reflecting on his own experience and that of his peers, he realized that the best apartment rental website for college students would put relevant information ahead of fancy features and gadgets. For apartments, this meant organizing apartment information by distance from campus and incorporating lots of apartment listings.
After starting in St. Louis, MOC turned to expansion to Chicago and Boston. But as a team of students in St. Louis, how could we keep the website valuable for students in these new markets? We naturally turned to the most logical resource: other college students. These Campus Ambassadors were empowered to build MOC at their school – marketing, sales, content… everything. From our inception, college students have been a critical source of our innovation – they keep us informed, relevant and student-centric.
Like most websites, we made our first dollars from online advertising. Although our website traffic was modest, our “response rates” were a lot higher than others. And then one day, an Ambassador asked a simple question: “Why can’t Ambassadors help our advertisers better connect with students on campus? Won’t that produce better results?”
What started as helping property owners drive rentals with Ambassador-driven virtual tours, off campus living guides and new student amenities, turned into a new approach to reach college students.
When we looked around, we realized that for all their resources and dollars, most businesses were only contributing to the advertising noise college students hear everyday. All the mass traditional media buys and “Brand Ambassadors” passing out candy and having slumber parties showed us one thing: it’s like nobody really understood how to reach college students anymore.
Since then, we’ve grown MovingOffCampus.com into a website that helps millions of college students move off campus every year, launched Bonfyre, a new location-based mobile app exclusively for college students and expanded our Ambassador network to nearly 100 campuses nationwide. We work with retailers, service providers, new products and national brands – from local businesses to the Fortune 500.
We’re creating new connections with college students everyday. It’s an exciting time.
