Ahmad Kareh

This term, I’m taking a social media and branding class from Dr. Leila Samil and Bridget Franciscovich at Harvard. The concepts taught in this class inspired me to incorporate social media into the service learning project in our Introduction to Marketing course. The results were overwhelmingly positive!

The service learning project was developed around Lupus awareness, it came about after I was honored to join the Lupus Foundation’s board in October, 2015. As a board member, one of my main responsibilities includes increasing awareness for the Lupus Foundation. The Lupus foundation in Utah is a small organization, and does not possess the funds to allow them to spend money on an awareness campaign.

The project needed to be easily scaled down to one small section of the class, or scaled up to accommodate multiple sections. It also needed to be simple enough to demonstrate how simple actions using pin-up boards and social media can create large impact and visibility. By utilizing social media, we were able to expand our reach, open the door for community engagement, and gather measurable results.

The idea was good and the Lupus Foundation was committed, they showed their support by fine tuning the flier and printing it in no time. I wanted to get the campaign off the ground as quickly as possible and for that I needed the support of colleagues and students. Barbie Willett, our Associate Dean, reached out to Lucy Smith at the Service Learning Department in Salt Lake Community College who offered tremendous support and helped me navigate through our policies. Lucy also offered many ideas and reflection prompts to help maximize student learning. I brainstormed the concept with several staff and faculty members including Missy Counter and Jennifer Klenk who helped me simplify the project by splitting it into three manageable assignments throughout the semester. I was very impressed with the commitment and contribution that came from SLCC students including Allison Stoker, Mateo Tobia and Amanda Mabe who played a major role in developing the details of the project and helped me see it through in a very short period of time.

Great minds, hard work and hours of strategizing resulted in a surprisingly simple concept. In this project, students use community boards to post 20 fliers in the city and take a selfie with the poster in the background. They then post the selfies on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram and thank the @business for their support for #UTLupus. Twistlab Marketing tallied the results and shared them with the students so they can see the effect they created and reflect on the process.

The Results

More than 90 students from multiple sections at Salt Lake Community College, SLCC DECA, and concurrent enrollment students from Summit Academy High School chose to participate in this project, and together they were able to generate:

Engagement: 118

This means that commutatively, students got a total of 118 people to engage with the Lupus Foundation in Utah.

Exposure and reach: 73,671

This means that over 70K people were exposed to the Lupus Foundation because of our students’ efforts. 

What They Said

“This service learning project gave me an idea of what marketing actually is by using social media, advertising, and the research that followed. When I first got into this project, I'll admit, I was a little confused on how I would make a difference by hanging up a few fliers. But, after seeing the results, I was very proud to say that I contributed to that. This was an excellent experience and I think this will definitely help me as I continue working toward my goal of becoming a Marketing Manager. I have been given the opportunity to learn a little bit more about what Lupus is and I'm glad it was brought to my attention because this is a very serious disease and I hope we can find a cure. I think this had an impact on the community by raising awareness and raising their curiosity.”

Kylee Bowden
Marketing 1030 student, Salt Lake Community College