Donations, like small businesses, come in all shapes, sizes and colors.

With a $225,000 pledge, Meritrust Credit Union has partnered with Wichita State’s Center for Entrepreneurship to support the Meritrust Business Booster Series.

The series includes seven or eight three-hour sessions each semester for the next three years. Lou Heldman, interim director of the WSU Center for Entrepreneurship, wants to provide students and local entrepreneurs with a useful business skill set.

“A lot of times, if you’re running a small business, you start the business because you have a passion for something in particular, like making jewelry or doing personal training,” Heldman said. “But you don’t necessarily have the exposure to all the business skills you need to turn that passion into a successful business. So that’s what we try to help people do.”

Each session in the series focuses on a different aspect of starting and running a small business.

“If they go to the whole series, it’s definitely going to give them different resources of places to go and get new information, or how to do their own research, or what different things to look at when starting a business,” Tammy Taylor, Meritrust’s commercial deposits coordinator, said.

While many entrepreneurs or students may benefit from attending the entire series, it is not required to attend each one. Every workshop is open to new attendees. Individual sessions cost $5 for WSU students and $50 for all other individuals, or $249 for the full, semester-long series.

The first two workshops this semester covered capitalizing on creative business ideas and developing innovative business models. The upcoming third session will discuss creating viable and attractive web content.

Brandi Koskie, director of publishing at Media Refined, is leading the “Conquering Content” workshop this Friday.

“Everybody kind of has their area of expertise. A lot of entrepreneurs understand the business side of it — the financing, the capital, the idea of marketing — but this is an area that a lot of people don’t always understand or pay attention to,” Koskie said. “If you have a web presence, and you do want to drive people to your website, it’s going to take more than a pretty home page; there’s got to be something that draws them in, and that’s content.”

The goal of the series is to educate students with small business ownership as a goal after graduation and providing continuing education for the entrepreneur who already has a business of their own.

“For students who don’t have a chance to take full courses in web marketing, these three-hour sessions are an excellent introduction for a way to enhance what students or business people may already have,” Heldman said.

The series allows students, entrepreneurs and established members of the business community to come together, teach one another and share resources. It provides a chance for those who have walked the paths before and learned the hard lessons to share their knowledge with others.

“I had owned my own small business prior to working in the finances, and I just want to be able to help on the other side,” Taylor said. “Having been the small business owner and had to close my shop, and now working on the other side, there’s a lot of resources that I didn’t know when I was doing that. So now I’m one of those resources for the small businesses.”

For more information about the Meritrust Business Booster Series visit Wichita.edu/businessbooster.