VCU news

By Megan Schmidt

More than 70 students at Virginia Commonwealth University will spend 24 consecutive hours completing marketing and advertising projects for free for 11 area nonprofits beginning Thursday morning.

The student volunteers will participate in the sixth CreateAthon onCampus, a marathon of student-generated creative work designed to help nonprofit organizations with little or no resources for advertising and marketing initiatives. The students will be supported by 30 mentors from agencies, corporations and professional organizations.

CreateAthon at VCU began in 2008 and is part of the national CreateAthon network developed by Teresa Coles and Cathy Monetti of Riggs Partners in Columbia, SC. It has provided 57 nonprofits in the Richmond area with professional marketing materials valued at more than $700,000 since it began. Nationally, more than 75 agencies, three universities, one corporation and one club have participated in the CreateAthon network, serving more than 1,100 nonprofits with 2,500 projects valued at $15 million.

Students will gather at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday to prep for the event’s kickoff at nine, when the fun really begins.

“The nonprofits have been well-prepared and interested in the process and they are definitely prepared for the help and work we will provide,” said Peyton Rowe, associate professor of advertising in the School of Mass Communications in the College of Humanities and Sciences at VCU, who is the director of the project and self-dubbed CreateAthon Evangelist. “I have a strong core of leaders in my group who, without a doubt, will produce some amazing ideas for these organizations.”

Student team leaders were selected late last fall based on their level of desire to work hard, collaborate and inspire teammates. They also had to have a drive and passion for what they do and be willing to challenge themselves and their peers. The leaders began getting to know their clients in January by researching the organizations and developing key strategies that built the foundation for the creative work that will occur Thursday and Friday. The leaders’ teams are made up of undergraduate students from the VCU School of Mass Communications and VCU School of the Arts.

Work for this year's event started in August 2012, by a group of interested CreateAthon alumni, called the gO! team. This group of passionate students is made up of a project manager, art director, web master, social media director, copywriter and videographer. In the fall, they were tasked with telling the story of CreateAthon at VCU through writing, video, photos and redesigning the website. This semester, they are there to continue to promote the event and provide technical support to the team leaders as well as build sponsorship.

“This has been an amazing arm of the CreateAthon program that was born from students last year,” said Rowe.

After the event, students will partner with local vendors to eliminate production costs for the nonprofits. The event itself will be documented live through the CreateAthon onCampus blog, http://createoncampus.tumblr.com/, on Twitter @createathonVCU and on Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/CreateAthonOnCampus.

The participating nonprofit organizations, selected from a pool of applications submitted last fall, are:

• Arts in the Alley
• Boys and Girls Clubs of Metro Richmond
• Brain Injury Association of Virginia (BIAV)
• Capital Region Land Conservancy
• Children’s Home Society of Virginia
• HomeAgain
• Junior League of Richmond
• Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Paralyzed Veterans of America
• The Giving Heart
• Tricycle Gardens
• Virginia Association of Free Clinics

The organizations were selected by a panel of professionals and students who used six criteria to judge the nonprofit applicants. The six criteria to meet were: budget – the organization had little to no marketing budget; location – the nonprofit’s mission must affect the local and regional community; project – the marketing need had to match what the CreateAthon students could provide within a 24-hour timeframe; presentation – the nonprofit must have a clear, organized and focused mission; level of need – the organization has little to no experience with advertising, visual communication or branding; and sustainability – whether or not an organization is able to maintain what is provided if the project demands continued attention.

For more information, visit http://createathononcampus.org/.