The Impact Management Academy’s prototype site was launched last February with a focus on onboarding a variety of courses and securing partnerships with the leading trainers in impact measurement and management education. A marketing effort was the next objective to begin attracting participants to our platform. In our search to build our team, the multifaceted Kate Ruff (who leads the Common Approach to Impact Measurement, and is an assistant professor of Accounting at Sprott School of Business at Carleton University and Co-Director of the Carleton Centre for Community Innovation (3ci), responded to our call.
She put us in touch with fellow professor and the academic director of Sprott’s project-based service-learning Initiative, Sprott Student Consulting Group (SSCG), Andrew Webb who would be able to provide the Impact Management Academy with not just an intern, but an entire team of Sprott students to build and lead our marketing strategy.
So last summer Impact Management Academy worked with a team of undergraduate and graduate students from Sprott to work with us to develop a marketing strategy. The team included young leaders from Jordan, Pakistan, India, Dubai, and Nigeria with backgrounds in product specialization, engineering, business and finance, and marketing. Despite the novelty of the world of impact measurement and management for the interns and the challenges faced with working across various time zones, Daniel Ojinaka, Sattam Khatib, Umair Aftab, and Zainab Rafique gracefully navigated the tasks at hand and helped shape Impact Management Academy’s marketing strategy and execution plan. With their support, we have published the Impact Management Academy Youtube channel, launched our first marketing campaign, and established an SEO strategy to improve our online presence and attract more prospective impact measurement and management students.
We were so impressed with the Sprott Student Consulting Group that we hired Umair, and we are continuing to work with a new SSCG fall team: Sattam Khatib has returned as team lead, joined by Noelle Corazze, Dominik Rivard, and Mackenzie Bacon. For the next few months, we will be implementing, analyzing, and iterating the marketing strategy developed by the summer team.
We would like to give special thanks to Professor Ruff who was thoughtful enough to go out of her way to make an introduction, and for her continual support of Impact Management Academy.