Although they compete for many of the same prospective students, business schools from Kansas University, Rockhurst and the University of Missouri-Kansas City are pooling their resources in a collaborative outreach effort to promote their MBA programs.

The partnership includes a website, a blog, informational sessions attended by all three schools and might eventually feature speaking events.

The three schools have one thing in common that they’re trying to make a key selling point for students: They’re all three accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Business Schools, a nearly 100-year-old organization founded by Harvard, Columbia University, New York University and other luminaries.

Catherine Shenoy, director of the KU MBA program, said the dean’s offices from KU, Rockhurst and UMKC met earlier this year to start hammering out ideas for collaboration. That was followed by meetings among communications and marketing staff from the three business schools to design the website, big3mba.com, and other aspects of the campaign.

The partnership gives all three schools a way to increase their marketing presence without having to scrounge up the extra money to do so.

“We don’t have huge marketing budgets,” Shenoy said. “We thought that this would be a good way to communicate a very important idea to students in a cost effective way.”