This course covers a wide range of basic marketing concepts. The major objective of this class is to provide students the basic tools to establish a foundation of the marketing process. The course material is designed to develop knowledge of both general and specialized marketing terms. Service learning is heavily integrated into this course in-order to help the student explore direct applications of marketing and how it can assist your community.
Did you know that 36% of college students in the US are hungry or food insecure while they attend school? And that number is increasingly higher for community college students. While the stereotype of the “starving college student” is seemingly normal, food is a basic human right, no matter your circumstances. A combination of rising tuition and fees, living costs, low wages, inadequate health care, as well as personal circumstances and situations all contribute to this ongoing problem. On-campus food pantries have become essential to increase student success and help them access what they need to reach their potential. Food pantries can be found at every major college or university in the state of Utah. While we know that many of our students and peers, or even ourselves, fall into this category, we also acknowledge our staff and faculty that utilize food pantries as well, knowing that this problem is much more widespread than just our student body population.
Plan:
In order to raise awareness about college hunger and the Bruin Pantry, we distributed fliers at local community boards to achieve the primary goal of raising awareness and provoking folks to think more about hunger and the effects thereof. We utilized hashtags and various social media platforms to achieve our secondary goal of engaging our online communities with college campus food pantries.
Results:
Total Impressions: 2240
Reflection:
This service learning project affected me a lot more than I thought it would.At the beginning of the project I thought I was just going to be able to fly through the project and get it over with to get a grade. I went and picked up the flyers and started reading the information on them. It really opened my eyes, I had no idea so many college students that I see everyday are struggling. This project really affected me because I realized how easy it is to raise awareness for any and all issues going on in the world today. I always thought it took a lot of time and effect to bring awareness about certain issues or problems but after doing this project I realized that even when you take a quick 5-10 minutes to hang up a few flyers or posters you are changing more lives than you think, it doesn’t always have to be this huge, time consuming project. This project really taught me how to come out of my comfort zone and strengthen my communication skills. While I was putting up the flyers I would have to find a manager or director to get my flyer approved before I hung it up. I don’t normally enjoy talking to be I don’t know so having to do this really helped me learn how to talk to others in a professional business way. Learning these different communication skills now will help me in similar situations in the future. Now I feel more comfortable about talking to others about business and marketing material. This will be extremely helpful in the future if I ever would like to do something like this again to bring awareness to a different problem or issue. It is now also easier for me to talk to people I don’t know. I feel like going out and doing this project really brought me out of my comfort zone and weirdly enough I feel more comfortable approaching and talking to strangers. This project met a few of the course outcomes for this class. The two that I think it hit the most were, “Communicate effectively” and “develop the knowledge and skills to work with others in a professional and constructive manner.” This project took a lot of communication and by the end of putting up my flyers I learned the best effective and professional way to go about asking if I could hang up my flyer on their board. I also realized that professional communication doesn’t always have to be as official as I thought it had to be. Sometimes all it takes is being sincere and respectful when communicating with a professional. I always thought that you had to use fancy words and have proper body language to even talk to a professional, but after doing this project I realized that isn’t always the case. It has always been a personal and professional goal of mine to be able to communicate with professionals without seeming nervous and having a hard time getting my words to come out of my mouth correctly. At the beginning of the project I found myself stuttering when I would talk to the mangers or forgetting what I was going to say but it seemed like after a few flyers were hung I got used to it. By the end I was doing so much better and was able to talk to the managers or directors like they were someone I knew for a long time. This is a really big accomplishment for me. In my opinion this project has a big impact on the community. Since we live in a state that is getting more developed and busy each day I don’t think people take the time to stop and think that there are still others struggling around us. College students are at a difficult time in their life. They are at an age where they feel like they should live on their own and not rely on their parents as much as they used to. With how expensive rent and mortgages are during this time it is hard for a college student to move out, pay rent, be able to afford any other bills that come with being independent and putting college tuition on top of that is almost impossible. This project really brings awareness to those that don’t realize how many college students are struggling just because they know how important having an education is. Just because it is hard doesn’t mean that the students give up, there are still students pushing to get through their degrees with as little to no debt as possible.