VisualCV

Sicard and Company is a boutique marketing consultancy that served Dodge as a client.  The target of their campaign for Dodge was the college student, and Student Business Associates from all around the country were brought in to bring the message to their campus.  The prime communication channels were interactive websites that only college students could participate in that involved contests, money for charity, and idea competitions.  

I led a team of 5 on my campus to spread the word about each of these promotional sites.  Our team set targets for number of sign-ups and kept in constant communication with the headquarters team.  We consistently met our goals, and participants from our school performed extremely well in the competitions.  In one competition an IU team won the 3rd prize of $5000 for charity, and in another competition we had a team be among the 10 winners of a $2000 trip.  In order to get student groups and individuals to buy into our campaign our team set up meetings with as many groups as possible and led a guerilla marketing campaign across campus with posters and fliers.

Through Sicard and Co. I also got the opportunity to participate in a weekend-long brainstorming session in New York City to discuss a new initiative that Dodge wanted to launch.  This new website involved Dodge actually giving away cars to college students and we allocated a $100,000 budget through the course of the weekend.  It was a great experience to see how effective brainstorming can be to reach a creative solution on such a large scale.

As Vice President for Professional Activities in my business fraternity, my partner and I set very ambitious goals.  Traditionally, professional events included bringing in speakers to talk about their career or working at career fairs.  Our vision was to focus on professional development in a practical sense.  We wanted to help our brothers learn skills that they could use in the real world.  We only wanted to bring in a speaker if it was someone of great stature and we were able to do that in Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels.  We worked with his assistants and brought him into an intimate crowd of about 70-80 students to discuss the future of Indiana and the economy.

Our professional development workshops consisted of our brothers giving tutorials on business tools that they knew well.  I led a workshop on Powerpoint and effective presentation style and another one of our brothers worked with us on providing guidance on Adobe Photoshop.  These workshops were valuable for the participants and the leaders.

We also organized a creative competition for our brothers that coordinated with the Business Economics department of our business school.  The department chair was in need of a new brochure to entice students to try that major and our fraternity formed teams to compete against each other in designing the new brochure.  Over 10 different designs were submitted so it gave the Business Economics department a wide variety of outstanding ideas to choose from.

Our final big event was to bring in a group called "Playbook for Life" that provided personal finance education to college students.  We worked alongside the athletic department to bring this to both business students and student athletes.  This was a very successful event with nearly 200 students coming to hear nationally recognized speakers discuss a topic that is very important to our future success. 

I took on the role of President of Intramural Sports council at the end of the fall semester in November 2007.  Over the winter break I worked on a new plan to conduct an online survey to determine what new intramural sports would be added to the schedule.  We set a goal of at least 500 responses to our survey after sending it out to various email lists and advertising in the campus Rec Centers.  We finished with over 900 responses and outpaced our goal by almost double!  Because of the strong interest we decided to add two new sports to the schedule instead of just one as originally planned so Home Run Derby and Frisbee Golf will now officially become Intramural Sports.

In coordination with my role of President in the council I decided to make Intramural Sports the theme of two separate projects in my classes.  First, in my marketing communication class I led a group of four to create a new advertising campaign for Intramural Sports.  Participation among women has been declining so we made them the focus of our new campaign.  We conducted some initial research and then positioned Intramural Sports as "The Fun Workout" when we realized a lot of girls were going to the gym but only to participate in repetitive workouts such as treadmills.  The marketing team for Intramurals liked our final product enough to begin implementing several of our ideas.  My role in the project was to design the presentation, research the underlying reasons that women were not participating, and manage the project as an overall project leader.

I also lead a separate team of five people on a market research project for Intramural Sports for my marketing research class.  Again my role was to manage the project, design the presentation and survey, and contribute to our full report.  This project involved a detailed survey which we sent out to fellow students to help us gain a better understanding of the target market.  We offered several creative solutions to perceived problems of the program.  It was great to see our ideas be received so well and the staff was excited to begin implementing them after our presentation.

As Director of Marketing my role was to create new advertisements and posters as well as maintain the group website.  In terms of the website I made minimal changes because the design was already in place and only the names and dates of certain things needed to be changed.  The ads that I created appeared in the RecSports magazine that is distributed to all students on campus at the beginning of each semester.  The ad was focused to grab attention as it featured bright yellow caution tape around the sides and an announcement that all Intramural Sports were cancelled for the year.  The tagline at the bottom read, "Just kidding, we work too hard to ever allow that to happen - Student Recreational Sports Association."  I also helped design a poster promoting the group that was featured in the recreational facilities on campus.

In this position my role was to create opportunities for group members to network with top consulting firms and gain valuable skills pertaining to the consulting industry.  My main goal was to set up successful events that featured presentations by firms looking to recruit on campus.  I set up events with Accenture, Alaris Consulting, Hitachi Consulting, and the Keystone Consulting Group as well as helped to facilitate an event with LCG.  It was a great experience working with these lead recruiters and giving the other members a great chance to show themselves to potential employers.

Another initiative that I started was a bi-weekly meeting for members to practice cases that are typical in interviews with consulting firms.  We had a professor who is an ex-McKinsey consultant start out our set of meetings by giving an overview of the best methods for approaching a case, and then we had a student lead each subsequent meeting.  These were very interesting to see how different leadership styles facilitated discussion and also to see the creative solutions that some students were able to use.

I also helped lay the framework for transitioning our group into a new area of real-world consulting work for local clients.  Although there were some legal issues to get through, we eventually got approval and our first client was Jake's Bar and Night Club.  Our goal was to conduct a market analysis and provide them with ideas on how to better position themselves to gain new customers, but unfortunately our project was cut short due to time constraints at the end of the semester.

The Indiana University set a goal in 2007 to raise $1 million for Riley Children's Hospital in Indianapolis.  The marathon had raised a lot of money for Riley over the years, but never $1 million in one year.  As part of the Corporate Relations Committee it was our job to initiate a large chunk of those funds so that all of the operating expenses would be covered and all of the donations given to the dancers could go straight to Riley.

I participated in several small scale fundraising events throughout Bloomington and also solicited donations from family members and friends.  I then contacted several local businesses to get them involved in the marathon by donating gift certificates or any goods that could be given away as prizes.  I also worked with the College of Arts and Sciences at IU to secure a $2500 donation that included t-shirts that were given to every single dancer.  

The marathon was an outstanding success and we surpassed $1 million for the first time ever!  This was a rewarding experience as I got to see many of the children with disabilities that go to Riley who we were ultimately raising the money to help.

Kelley Marketing X was formed in 2007 as a new creative marketing group designed to give students an outlet to improve the skills needed to launch a career in the creative side of marketing.  I became a senior member in the club as one of the initial invitees.  Most of the semester was spent planning new initiatives for the future and laying the groundwork for a successful club in the long-term.  One major goal was to form partnerships with companies so that we could act as an advertising group and pitch our ideas on how to improve the companies' brand.

We were able to secure a partnership with Discover and a creativity competition was launched to market Discover credit cards to college students.  I participated on a team of six that went on to win second place in the competition.  This was a great experience for me because it allowed us to start with a very basic constraint and then let our creativity drive the campaign from there.  My major roles on the project were to conduct research in order to give credible data points on our ideas and also to design the presentation.