Marketing students advise Richmond community center

BY HOLLY RODRIGUEZ
Media and Public Relations Officer

After successfully completing a $19 million renovation, managers of the Weinstein JCC knew they needed to change their marketing strategy to strengthen their brand and continue membership growth.

They turned to students at University of Richmond's Robins School of Business for analysis and recommendations—a completely free consultation project—and after several months of implementation, the business students' research is paying off.

"One of the most significant and useful things they helped us with was assessing the competition and putting us in context with them, to give us a clearer picture of how we measured up," says Jordan Shenker, executive director of the Weinstein JCC.

A membership-based community center traditionally targeting area Jewish residents, Weinstein JCC wanted to increase the general public's participation in several specific programs and overcome its reputation as being exclusively for Jewish people.

Dr. Dana-Nicoleta Lascu, chair and associate professor of marketing, turned the Weinstein JCC's marketing dilemma into assignments for two of her classes. She divided an undergraduate marketing research class into groups and assigned them to promote two fitness programs, adult recreation, after-school child care and pre-school care. She gave the center's communications plan to MBA students in a strategic marketing class.

Each undergraduate group spent three months identifying the problem facing their assigned program, devising a strategy, conducting research and analyzing the data before presenting recommendations. The MBA students gathered all of the Weinstein JCC's internal and external communications materials for analysis and recommended changes.

Weinstein JCC's marketing team was so impressed that they asked two of the undergraduate groups to present their research to the organization's board of directors.

"The quality of the work they did would have easily cost $15,000 to $20,000 in the marketplace," Shenker says. "We were impressed with their professionalism—they asked good questions and thought about the challenges in a very deliberate way."

The Robins School seeks out such projects in the local community to provide local businesses with the latest marketing tools and research and give senior business majors the opportunity to gain practical experience using theoretical knowledge.

"You know the basics," says Julia Abramova of Richmond, who worked on the project and graduated in May 2007. "But this class taught us how to fine tune what we already knew, apply it and polish it so that we could effectively explore the topic."

Shenker says the students' research yielded valuable business insight while helping create a viable long-term marketing plan for a good cause.

"We're implementing the strategies in two phases, because we received so much data, it made our heads spin," he says. "But we're evaluating the data provided by both groups, and the information will be used for many years to come."