Utilizing Undergraduate Marketing Interns:
Maximizing Student Awareness and Use of Academic Enhancement’s Services Academic Enhancement, University of Kentucky Megan Blankenship, Outreach Coordinator Lauren Cole, Larissa McLaughlin, and Amanda Mundy, Undergraduate Marketing Interns Why Undergraduate Interns? The Study is home to Academic Enhancement, a collection of student resources that includes peer tutoring, various academic consultations, GRE and GMAT prep courses, and Study Smarter seminars. Although AE services are available to all students, targeting the success of first year students is vital for promoting retention. Thus, undergraduates are the ideal agents to meet the following objectives: 1) Initiate awareness of AE services among students, faculty, and administrators. During Summer 2007, marketing interns designed full‐color brochures describing AE programs and services for distribution to students, faculty, and administrators, using this opportunity to establish contacts within various academic departments. They also designed laminated posters for an Academic Enhancement booth at the Summer Advising Program, which are now used at The Study entrance. 2) Create a visually distinctive space so that students can easily locate The Study. Although The Study is conveniently located for most first‐year students within the same building as the main dining hall, it was not easily identifiable initially. Interns focused on familiarizing students with the location by designing consistent signage, creating floor decals with directional arrows, painting a highly visible entrance, and identifying the student sign‐in area with the AE logo. 3) Attract students to The Study by promotion through various media on a regular basis. Throughout the Fall 2007 semester, interns used various methods to promote AE services, such as posting flyers for tutoring subjects in corresponding classrooms, posting general information campus‐wide, and distributing postcards in residence hall mailboxes at mid‐term. They also advertised in the residence hall monthly newsletter and on the campus TV network, Channel 50. 4) Manage administrative responsibilities necessary to facilitate effective marketing. In addition to managing standard tasks such as implementation of a filing system for materials, interns regularly collaborated with vendors and university associates to accomplish marketing projects. They tracked these projects using Sharepoint software, enabling AE staff to easily access documents. They also developed a fiscal marketing budget for a funding proposal to university administration. 5) Network at university‐sponsored events to promote our student‐friendly image. Interns interacted with students at freshman orientation events, sponsored a prize giveaway at UK ice hockey games, and distributed “brain food” packets at a midnight breakfast during finals week. 6) Launch campaign for a new peer tutoring location, “The Study Too,” in Spring 2008. Currently, interns are designing signs that will be placed in highly visible locations on central campus, and plan to design a banner for the entrance that can easily be seen from the main classroom building. A grand opening event will be held soon for students, faculty, and administrators, and flyers announcing the new location will be posted in buildings across campus.