Featured Testimonial About Creighton University
You can sign up for the Bluejay Business Network today.
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If you’re a Creighton alum (or parent, professor, friend or fan), you probably like to employ the services of other Creighton-educated professionals. Creighton dentists, Creighton lawyers, Creighton nurses, physicians, physical therapists and financial planners. You just know from experience that they received a great education.
Thanks to a new effort by Creighton alumni and the University’s Alumni Relations office, finding Bluejay-owned businesses in your area just got a whole lot easier.
The recently launched Bluejay Business Network offers a nationwide directory to connect Creighton alumni offering services with Creighton alumni and friends seeking those services. The project was initiated and driven by alumni, specifically a common alumni request — I just moved to a new city. Can you send me a list of Creighton-educated dentists in my area?
“And we realized we just didn’t have that list,” says Jim Sullivan, BSBA’08, assistant director of Regional and Outreach Programs with Alumni Relations. “We had a list of all the Creighton dentists in a particular area, but we didn’t know if they had a current practice or were taking patients.”
At first, Alumni Relations would handle the requests by simply Googling each Creighton dentist in a market area to see if they were practicing, then pass the info on to the alum who requested it. It was quickly apparent there had to be a better way to do this. That better way ended up being an alumni-driven database.
Since requests for Creighton dentists were the biggest factor in starting the directory to begin with, the Bluejay Business Network is now mostly Creighton dentists. But all Creighton-educated professionals who own a business providing services in health care, law, business, education, the arts, whatever — and all Bluejays interested in using those services — are encouraged to sign up today (it’s free).
The more Bluejays who use the Bluejays Business Network, the more useful it will be, says Sullivan.
“People who love Creighton want to work with and employ the services of people who went to Creighton,” he says. “That speaks volumes to the quality of the schools and colleges and the level of preparation our students are getting.”
Another potential benefit for the business owners who sign up: a deeper connection to the Creighton community. If you own your own business, Sullivan says, “you’re obviously busy in a variety of ways. You may not have time to attend an event in your city. The Bluejay Business Network gives you an opportunity to stay engaged with Creighton and connect with Bluejays in your area.”
Creighton couple Kale Langley, DDS’11, and Brooke Smars, DDS’12, own their own practice, West Lake Dental Center, in Minneapolis. They were part of the early discussions that got the Bluejay Business Network rolling.
“We’ve had patients seek us out because of the Creighton connection, often because they read our profiles on our website,” says Langley, who is also a member of the School of Dentistry Alumni Advisory Board. “But it’s so much easier to consolidate this all in one place.”
It makes perfect sense alumni would be interested in this, he says. If you believe in the Jesuit values of Creighton — cura personalis, for and with others, magis — you believe in the practices and other businesses now living those values.
Langley says that their Creighton education revealed or strengthened something in him and Brooke, and now they bring that particular something — that something more — to every encounter with every patient they serve.
Want to learn more about businesses like theirs? Sign up for the Bluejay Business Network today.
