Proposal for Social Marketing Competition

From: Charles M. Wood, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Marketing

Collins College of Business

University of Tulsa

Professor Wood contacted Jack, Jimmy, Pat and Karen Gwynne proposing AMA/Collegiate involvement in this competition. Pat has requested information for review by the CCC.

Email from Professor Wood – June 22, 2009

Question: Who would I talk with about getting help spreading the word to the other AMA chapters about an event that we will be sponsoring next spring? We’d like to get your thoughts about helping us publicize a student marketing competition for Spring ’10 that is focused on not-for-profit organizations. We have funding and resources already available, including the prizes. We developed and hosted a successful state-wide collegiate “social innovation challenge” last spring, but we’d like to focus on making this year more of a marketing competition because great marketing on a shoestring budget is one of the greatest needs of not-for-profits. We are prepared to host this event at TU, and we would like to make it a national student competition (I’m a veteran of several NSACs).

It would help if we could get help spreading the word to other AMA chapters around the nation – in return AMA would be named as one of the primary sponsors. We believe this would be a good way to get even more students interested in AMA and while helping deserving NFPs in a tangible way.

I know each of you has a wealth of wisdom, and I would appreciate your thoughts and feedback on this idea.

Email from Professor Wood – June 25, 2009

Hi Patricia, good hearing from you and thanks for your interest! I’ll provide a little description to get our conversation started.

Just as a point of reference and to show you what we did last year, I’m attaching the poster and entry guidelines from the competition we hosted last semester. It was issue-driven, focused on Oklahoma, and we had 72 students from several universities across the state participate. As I mentioned earlier, we want to make this year’s competition more “marketing” or “promotion”–driven where teams prepare a complete and integrated marketing plan that culminates in a promotional campaign for a set of not-for-profit organizations. We also want to broaden participation to include teams from around the country.

Perhaps you’re familiar with the National Student Advertising Competition – I have advised a student team for that competition for several years, and the format really generates a lot of excitement, intense competition, and good ideas. Students prepare a 32-page “plansbook” that includes industry insights, market research, positioning strategies, creative development, media planning, and both traditional and non-traditional media. However, the clients are often major corporations (AOL, Coke, Toyota) and won’t use any of the 200+ entries that students around the country labor so long and hard over. I envision an AMA social marketing competition that leverages all that awesome student talent (like NSAC does) to generate a plansbook as well as real, practical, and ready-to-use media, materials, and ideas within a small client budget so that they will actually be implemented by the clients – because not-for-profit organizations are constantly looking for good help with marketing and promotion. AMA student members will benefit too by having a great plansbook to show potential employers during interviews.

There are two ways we could construct the competition –

Model 1: We choose 5 not-for-profit organizations, have them describe their problem or challenge in detail (with help from us), and student teams may choose which organization’s problem they wish to work on. There will be lots of awards, cheering, and pats on the back. Five sets of awards would be given – one set for the 3 best marketing campaigns for each organization’s challenge - there would also be overall winners. Five sets of judges would be appointed: AMA professional chapter members, experts in the area, and representatives from the client organizations. We would be happy to handle the processing of entries and judging. I believe that AMA student membership should be a requirement for participation.

Model 2: We choose one national not-for-profit organization, and all teams work on that client’s problem (NSAC’s model).

- Model 1 would spread the wealth to more NFP organizations and give more recognition to more student teams. Model 2 would be logistically easier.

Last year’s timing of a late March deadline with a mid-April live event worked well. Just as an idea, the event could be called AMA Collegiate Social MArketing Challenge (ama c-smac). Ok, there’s probably a much better name out there than that! I recommend we begin promoting this event in October of this year.

Let me know what you think. I’d be happy to prepare some initial materials (sketches of competition logo, poster) if it would help you as you discuss the idea with the Collegiate Chapters Council. I understand if they would prefer a smaller, regional 1st year effort, but we experimented with our own launch last year and I would like to see the benefits extended to AMA students around the country.

Sorry for the book - I bet you have questions – please feel free to call or email anytime. Thanks again for your interest!

Charlie