On Monday, December 9, Professor Al Fattal, Assistant Marketing Professor at the University of Minnesota Crookston, and his Marketing Research (MKTG 3400) students gave presentations on their community engagement project. The class showcased the findings to help the City of Crookston enhance its communication strategies.
The presentation was done in two parts. The first group focused on helping the City of Crookston enhance its communications strategies. “We worked on our communications project, and that was basically what social media works to reach the population better,” said marketing student Ellianna Cymbaluk. The students did research, surveys, interviewed a professional, and more to develop ways to enhance the city’s communications. Cymbaluk tells us that this project took the whole semester. “This met the whole of the class requirements and we basically took all semester,” says Cymbaluk. “We had a couple of other assignments along with this, but it was mainly like this is what we worked on all semester.” Cymbaluk says that her group found that the residents of Crookston, based on the surveys they collected, really prefer a lot of communication platforms. Facebook seemed to be the top communication network, and KROX (radio broadcasting) was right behind that, but she said that many still like to use the city’s website and other means of communication, such as in person and in newspapers. The students in the Communications presentations were Jacqueline Calderon, Ellianna Cymbaluk, Grant Lidholm, Chandler Meeks, Lanie Padelford, and Olivia Walsh.
The second group focused on enhancing the City of Crookston’s website. This group used the same surveys as the first group for their project, just with their own questions. From the information they gathered, it seems that the City of Crookston’s website is somewhat dated and hard to use. Kristen Borchert, one of the students in this group, explained the goal of their project. “It ended up being how we utilize community engagement to help hopefully improve the Crookston website,” says Borchert. “I think probably the most important information we came up with would be the recommendations that we believe the city could take and use to improve the website for Crookston residents and potential visitors.” The students in the website enhancement project were McKenna Bennett, Kristen Borchert, Bethanie Gravelle, Tristan Morneault, Braden Schmitz, and Alexandra Wentland.
The Marketing Strategies presentations were well attended and well received. Professor Fattal opened the floor to a short question-and-answer session before the students needed to head off to their next class. Multiple attendees mentioned to the class that their presentations were impressive, and they hoped to see them doing this again for Crookston’s City Council in the near future.
