USFSM Marketing Students Partner with the Campus of Caring

Dr. Faizan Ali, Assistant Professor at USFSM's College of Hospitality & Tourism Leadership, was looking for opportunities to give his students real-world experience in our community. At Glasser/Schoenbaum, we are looking for ways to partner with our local institutions of higher education.

Thanks to mutual time spent reaching into the community, last September his graduate students met with a handful of agencies on the Glasser/Schoenbaum campus for a project focused on using students' marketing training to help solve a problem for four human services nonprofits.

With a focus on Hospitality and Tourism, the projects involved fundraising events for four organizations.

• Coastal Behavioral Healthcare is interested in finding ways to attract out-of-town traffic to its upcoming Mental Health Symposium.
• Healthy Start of Sarasota wanted to see if it was possible to reach out more to the younger generation for their annual luncheon.
• For Glasser/Schoenbaum, we are looking to bring our 30th anniversary gala, BELIEVE, to a broader audience.
• More Too Life took the opportunity to focus on how to get hotels to play a more active role in preventing sex trafficking.

Dipping our toes into this kind of partnership came with takeaways about the project itself. The agencies got fresh insights about how we can all help our message get out into the world. The students got hands-on, real world examples of marketing challenges for nonprofits.

Everyone agreed that they would enjoy more time to explore the possibilities.