For their volunteer efforts in assisting numerous nonprofits at the outset and during some of the most trying days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Jindal School’s undergraduate marketing program and its students won the 2021 Corporate Social Responsibility Marketing Award from the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of American Marketing Association at its virtual gala Oct. 7.

Dr. Julie Haworth, BS in Marketing director, submitted the award nomination on behalf of the students and undergraduate faculty members who helped them. She cited work students did to assist nonprofits ranging from Mosaic Family Services, which aids immigrant and refugees in crisis, and the Richardson Animal Shelter, to the Pleasant Grove Food Pantry and the Army Scholarship Foundation, which provides college scholarships to the sons and daughters of Army veterans as well as to spouses of enlisted soldiers.

Haworth covered work undertaken in seven sections of four marketing courses in the spring and fall of 2020. Student efforts ranged from conducting surveys and drafting marketing plans to giving the nonprofits additional technical capabilities, improving their websites and increasing their social media presence.

“I think one of the main benefits associated with our classroom work for project sponsors and clients is that we help them define the marketing they need,” Haworth says. “Many times, they don’t really know what they need until our students start working with them.”

Two student teams “proved to be invaluable in bringing new ideas and insights to our operation,” said Rose Gault, president of the Army Scholarship Foundation. “For a small organization such as ours, these highly knowledgeable and dedicated students helped us to bring our overall marketing efforts and planning to new levels, and they also assisted us with fundraising ideas.”

In all, Haworth determined, 263 students gave 16,690 hours of their time. Using a volunteer hour value of $28.54 — as set by the Independent Sector, a coalition of nonprofits, foundations and others, in partnership with the Do Good Institute at the University of Maryland — their work donation was worth $476,333.

Haworth and her colleagues have for many years assigned students in Product and Brand Management (MKT 3320), Marketing Research (MKT 3340), Digital and Internet Marketing (MKT 4330) and Social Marketing (MKT 4360) to projects that aid nonprofits.

Since fall 2018, when Jindal School Dean Hasan Pirkul instituted a requirement that all undergraduates complete 100 hours of community service in order to graduate, work on those projects has been eligible for community service credit.

The AMA DFW award “is more than a nice pat on the back,” Pirkul said. “It says our students are making praiseworthy contributions that their professional marketing peers respect, and that respect means we are doing our job in readying them for the workplace.”

The BS in Marketing program scored another AMA DFW award when marketing and global business double major Jasmine Nguyen was named the chapter’s Collegiate Marketer of the Year.