Digital marketing students immersed with real clients, real budgets

KALAMAZOO, Mich.—What would you do with an extra $10,000 to boost your organization? Western Michigan University digital marketing students found out firsthand by participating in Google’s Nonprofit Marketing Immersion Program. The program pairs student teams with qualifying nonprofit organizations around the country and gives them a generous grant to apply toward Google search ads that benefit their clients. 

Restore to Empower offers educational programs for underprivileged, at-risk youth and disadvantaged and abused women.  The organization didn't have much experience in advertising as a way to generate donations, but the team of Western students quickly saw that they could help with much more than just the digital ad campaign.

“Our team’s nonprofit lacked a sufficient online presence or a cohesive website for optimal search engine optimization,” says Cook, whose role was to connect with the nonprofit advisor, hand-pick campaign groups, and assist with planning and creating a new website. “Our team crafted a new website that created an ideal environment for search engines and ad generation. After the new website was launched, Restore to Empower experienced an increase in volunteers, donations and website traffic.”

Choral Consortium of San Diego advocates in support of the arts, promotes member choral engagements, organizes community-wide choral events, and offers training. Their goal was to bring more awareness to the organization, its mission, and events.

“Choral Consortium of San Diego is a niche organization. One of the biggest challenges we faced with the project was coming up with the right keywords,” says Mansour, whose team got hands-on practice with professional keyword research tools such as SEMrush while planning their campaigns.

The team set a goal of a 5% click-through rate from their Google ads. After placing ads with strategic keywords, the team achieved a click-through rate of 8%.

“We had full reign over what we did and how well we did it. It was up to us to make it great which feels good when you see numbers going up and money spent,” says Mansour.

For more information about the digital marketing and eCommerce program and experiential learning at WMU, visit the program website.

For more WMU news, arts and events, visit WMU News online.