The Bennion Center at the University of Utah is celebrating 30 years of community service. Marketing students are creating an ad campaign to honor the organization.
“We will be driving our advertising into the eye of the consumer, which in this case is students and the community,” said Danielle Bastion, who was elected President of Operations by her marketing class. “What we really want to do is increase people’s knowledge of the Bennion Center.”
Since it was established in 1987, the Bennion Center has provided thousands of students with opportunities to serve. Students work in groups or with an outside agency to provide help to a community in need. Many projects center around helping youth, the elderly and marginalized populations. Students can also work with the Bennion Center to create their own projects centered on an issue or group of their choosing.
“I think it’s a huge opportunity for students,” Bastion said. “They will have the opportunity to engage in community service. There are huge networking opportunities, and employers these days are looking for hands on experience whether they are paid or not.”
The Bennion Center helps students get involved in the community in a variety of ways, which range from tutoring elementary school students after school to going on an alternative break trip to volunteer in other places.
During spring break this year, students will volunteer in communities such as Seattle to provide aid to the homeless, San Diego to help refugees, Las Vegas to empower at-risk youth and Colorado to uplift the impoverished.
Professor Ken Foster is leading the team of marketing students working on the Bennion Center’s awareness campaign.
“We set up the class to be an advertisement agency, so we have a marketing team, a research team, a PR team, a management team, a design team, and a media team,” Bastion said.
Students in each team will collaborate over the course of the next semester to implement a strategic marketing campaign for the Bennion Center. Currently, they are in the preliminary research stages of their campaign.
“So far, all we have done is secondary research,” said Bastion. “We’re working on building our primary research with a survey for students.”
After research has been conducted, the different teams will work together toward their goal of bringing more student volunteers to the Bennion Center.