Marketing-in-Not-For-Profits Class: El Sistema Leadership Project
During the spring semester of 2020, I chose to take on the position as leader of a project for my Marketing in Not-for-Profits class. My main goal for this project was to effectively lead the fundraising and promotion (social media marketing) teams to host a non profit-based event on campus in April and to promote and increase attendance to the Allentown Symphony Orchestra event. The not-for-profit organization we worked directly with was called El Sistema, and their purpose is to provide elementary through high school students from underprivileged areas the opportunity to explore orchestral music by learning to play various string instruments and other instruments. Our class goal was to host El Sistema on campus for a day to show them Muhlenberg and for them to perform for us, and the other half of the class worked on increasing student attendance at the Allentown Symphony Orchestra concert we were conducting marketing for. My main responsibilities included weekly Friday meetings with the other team leader Jordan Steinroeder and my professor Gail Eisenberg. At these meetings we would meet to ensure proper quality management and progress has been made for each team according to their given scheduled plan of action for the semester.
I was extremely grateful for this experience as I was able to explore and apply many concepts I read about in Leif Babin and Jocko Willink’s famous leadership book Extreme Ownership. Through this experience I realized the importance of consistent communication, prioritizing and executing in times of difficulty, how to work through obstacles within the teams I was leading to effectively and efficiently find solutions, and ultimately to lead and direct each team towards their common goal. Unfortunately our progress was halted due to Covid-19 abruptly interrupting our semester, however Gail, Jordan, and I were able to successfully pivot the the fundraising team’s efforts to hit their financial goal through creating a GoFund.Me page. We were able to do this by socially and organically marketing the GoFund.ME page to friends and family first then on Instagram through Muhlenberg’s Business Department account.
