Communications Students Bring Fresh Marketing Ideas to Local Nonprofits

During the 2025 Fall semester, Communications students in the Principles of Advertising class collaborated on a project in which they simulated working as a professional marketing and advertising company. They were presented with three local nonprofit organizations in Dubuque: Dubuque Forward, Brain Health Now, and Wanderwood Gardens. This semester, they are working to make those initiatives come to life.

Students during the final presentation last semester

The class was divided into three groups and chose a nonprofit to take on. Theirobjective was to investigate their respective organization and see how they could improve their marketing and advertising in terms of addressing any communications challenges. They then came up with ideas for message direction or placement. From there, each group worked on developing campaign goals and key messages that adequately represented their nonprofit’s goals. They chose platforms and placements, either print, digital, or social, to put said messages on display. After creating these ideas and developing placement strategies, they built creative samples and a strategy pitch.

Once the project goals were clear and students had formed their groups and chosen their nonprofit to work with, they used class time to meet with the heads of each organization. In these meetings, the organizations presented who they were and what their work entailed within the Dubuque community. Here, students were able to ask questions and gain a clear grasp of what each nonprofit’s goal and message were.

The group of students taking on Dubuque Forward researched the nonprofit, discovering it is an organization that focuses on highlighting the downtown city of Dubuque. The nonprofit’s goal is to market the city in a light that offers a welcoming environment that younger generations would want to discover and eventually settle down in. The group identified that Dubuque Forward’s communications challenge was a lack of advertising and marketing on social media platforms. They suggested that a higher social media presence would allow them to more strongly reach their target audience. The students’ approach to addressing this challenge was to boost social media content and presented ideas for posts using platforms such as Instagram and TikTok.

Brain Health Now is an organization that aims to tackle the stigma surrounding the term “mental illness.” Their goal is to transition from using the term “mental health” to saying “brain health.” Similar to the Dubuque Forward group, these students also looked at boosting social media activity to help inform Dubuque residents of the initiative and resources provided by this organization. They also looked as deep as possibly changing the wording and colors of the organization's platform and brand, so as to receive a greater interaction from the public with the nonprofit and their initiative.

Wanderwood Gardens was founded by Debi and Andy Butler, and the Butler Children’s Garden Foundation. This garden, opening later this year, will serve as anopen space for people of all ages to enjoy and reconnect with nature. The students in this group worked on ways to market the opening of the gardens by researching wherewould be best to place advertisements in the form of billboards throughout the city. They looked at ways in which they could market the Gardens to children through their parents or grandparents, as well as showing that it can be a space for teenagers and college students to enjoy, too.

Each group did extensive research into their chosen nonprofit and worked tirelessly in collaboration with one another to create the best marketing and advertising plan in hopes of being able to put their plans into action the following semester. On December 3^rd, all groups met with the heads of all three nonprofits, Wendy Scardino of Dubuque Forward, Claira Kapraun of Brain Health Now, and Jared McGovern of WanderwoodGardens, at the Dubuque Forward Offices to present their marketing and advertising ideas that they spent the entire semester researching and coming up with.  

This Spring semester, the same communications students, along with a few new additions to each team, are taking their ideas and making them a reality as part of their Communication Theory class. Each group met once again with their respective heads of their nonprofit as a check-in to ask questions and create a strong relationship to then implement their ideas into each organization.