Business students advise Nashville Chamber on Partnership 2010 website
Janel Shoun |
Greater Nashville has made big news in the past few years by attracting so many major corporations, such as Nissan, within our boundaries. This past fall, Lipscomb University business students had the chance to help Nashville marketers keep that positive trend going.
Randy Steger, Lipscomb professor of marketing, makes a point to involve his students in real-world projects every semester he can. In fact, he has a waiting list of companies requesting the talents of Lipscomb students to improve their marketing efforts.
In the fall, 29 students in his classes were hired to analyze the Partnership 2010 Website hosted by the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce and other nearby chambers. Partnership 2010 is an economic development program designed to attract businesses to Nashville and the surrounding communities, and the Website is an important first entry point for many companies considering a move.
So chamber officials were eager to hear the observations of the students, whose task was to analyze the delivery of information on the Website, consider how the site is used to interact with chamber members and evaluate how that interaction can help recruit new businesses to the area, said Garrett Harper, research director for the Nashville area chamber.
“We had student groups look at peer cities to see how they use their Websites, they talked to consultants on Web design, they did a user critique and looked at the graphic design,” said Harper.
The project took the entire semester, and last December, the students presented their findings to chamber officials in a Powerpoint presentation.
Students suggested that the international portion of the Website should have content more accessible to an international audience; they suggested language changes; and recommended optimizing the search engine so the site would rank higher in Web searches by non-English viewers.
“We took their suggested changes very seriously,” Harper said. “We have met with our Web designers and everyone felt it was a valuable experience.”
Valuable for the students as well, as they were able to make contacts helpful in their future careers and obtain experience creating a marketing plan and a Website audit, a valuable skill in today’s Web-dominant world.
“This project was great in that it gave us a real-life example of what a marketing researcher might do,” said Ryan Spinger, a junior marketing major who helped make the final presentation to chamber officials. “There was a real sense of importance to this project because not only were we receiving a grade but we were influencing an actual business.”
“In the last several years most industries began facing the highest level of competition they have ever faced, and whenever that occurs, marketing becomes more important,” Steger said. “Even chambers of commerce now face more competition because of all the instant information on the Internet. It’s not enough just to have a good Website, you have to have a good strategy around the Website.”