USC students spent over 24 hours in the School of Journalism volunteering their time and investing their talents for the annual “CreateAthon@USC."
Brought to the university by professor Karen Mallia and instructor Scott Farrand, "CreateAthon@USC" is an event where students who applied and were selected to be involved in the process create new marketing campaigns for local non-profits.
Each team of roughly eight students and two mentors are assigned a non-profit and spend the day creating strategies that they will eventually present to representatives of their local non-profit in hopes that the organization will adopt their strategies.
Jennifer Hammond, a USC alumna who currently works for David&Goliath, was one of the professionals contacted to be a mentor to one of the groups.
“We've really primarily been kind of guiding them through the process, because obviously we want them to come up with the ideas, but at some point, sometimes, it gets a little bogged down, so we have to break through and get them back on track,” Hammond said. “And, at times, we kind of point out a couple things here and there or even question, 'How did you come up with this.'”
Hammond was the mentor to the group that worked with the Lighthouse for Life, an organization against human trafficking. The two student leaders in the group were Brooke Strozdas, third-year advertising student, and Angie Rishtbarger, fourth-year visual communications student. The goal for their team was awareness and funding for the organization.
“Angie and I have been doing this since basically the beginning of the semester,” Strozdas said. “Our class starts the very beginning of the semester researching and the start-up to this and all of the creative work happens here overnight.”
Many of the groups faced challenges getting the ball rolling and even as the night progressed. Around 1 a.m., Rishebarger's group faced their biggest challenge.
“The worst part was probably around 1 a.m. when someone came in the room and was like, 'Hey, you guys should know the logo that your non-profit uses, we actually found that they stole it from Pinterest, so you should probably redo it,’” Rishebarger said.
The group did successfully create a new logo and presented their campaign later that day. Even with the struggles they faced, the group was satisfied with their end result.
“The best part, honestly, is probably the end result ... I really had no idea that we were going to be able to do as much as we did,” Rishebarger said. “We did everything that we wanted do and so much more, and it all just kind of happened out of nowhere. It was very stressful, and then all of a sudden, we just had it.”