Where can businesses and nonprofit organizations with tight budgets turn for new perspectives on marketing strategy and research? For some, the answer is the local business school.

Marketing professors at DePaul University’s College of Commerce regularly partner with Chicago-area for- and not-for-profits to use these organizations’ marketing problems as real-life cases in their courses. The collaborations offer students the opportunity to apply their marketing lessons to actual business problems, while providing the organizations with data and fresh ideas on how to solve them. In addition to numerous arrangements made by individual professors, DePaul’s Integrated Marketing Education program has paired honors marketing students with nearly 50 business organizations to do hands-on marketing work during the last 15 years.

Such partnerships can be particularly beneficial for start-ups. Two years ago, Cheryl Formento and Kathleen Benner, cousins and co-founders of Hospital Companions Inc., were developing the business plan for their company when they sought advice from Henry Rodkin, a DePaul executive-in- residence who volunteers at the Chicago office of the U.S. Small Business Administration. In addition to providing insights from his 30 years in corporate marketing, Rodkin encouraged the duo to team up with his DePaul Marketing 301 class.

Formento and Benner’s business plan envisioned a service that provides families with on-site advocates to help guide hospital and nursing home care of relatives when family members can’t be there. Formento, who lives in Naperville, Ill., said the business idea emerged from her and Benner’s experiences navigating logistical and communication problems associated with the care of their own family, including Formento’s father, a retiree and cancer patient who had moved to South Carolina. "To be involved in his care from afar was challenging and frustrating, and I thought, wouldn’t it be useful I could hire someone there who could help?" she explained. "We thought: there’s a gap here, let’s fix this and build something to help other families facing this."

The two entrepreneurs asked Rodkin’s class to research potential target markets, business competitors and effective pricing strategies, among other issues. "The class really sparked with this idea," Rodkin said. "It embodied several DePaul missions because it involved service and practical learning, with the students applying the principles of marketing to actual business issues."

The students were "helpful in their ability to gather supportive research pertaining to the healthcare field," Formento said. "The feedback gathered by the students supported the direction we were going and freed us up to develop other aspects of the business. And it was a good opportunity for the students because they got to dig into research for a real start-up."

Corinne Nelles, a senior who took the class, agreed, calling the project "absolutely invaluable."

"The experience solidified in my mind that marketing was something that I really could see myself doing in the future," she said.

Hospital Companions (www.HospitalCompanions.com) now offers its patient advocacy services in more than 30 Chicago-area communities.

Non-profits, with their often lean budgets and staffing, also have benefited from working with DePaul students.

Marketing Professor Steve Kelly taught a course this spring in which graduate and professional students were challenged by the McCormick Foundation to come up with new ideas to promote The Chicago Tribune Charities, which makes grants to Chicago-area organizations that help children and strengthen communities

"The McCormick Foundation has been using more traditional media, including direct mail and public service announcements, to build its donor base," Kelly explained. "The problem is that the media audience is declining and buying direct marketing lists for mailings isn’t always an effective way to find donors. So they wanted to see if electronic and social media could bring more attention to the charity’s story and help them connect with more donors."

Four student teams in Kelly’s class spent nine weeks researching the issue before presenting their marketing concepts to charity representatives. The team judged to have the best proposal suggested a mix of old and new media, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, to virally spread inspirational personal stories of people helped by the charity’s grants—all under the theme, "share some good news."

"The team presented a clear plan that bridged the Tribune’s traditional media of the newspaper and WGN with interactive media," Kelly said. "Overall, the judges were impressed with the ideas generated by the students and said several could be implemented immediately."

Jill Kahan, a student on the top team, said she gained a greater understanding of new marketing methods through the class. "With the online and social media tools available to marketers today, you can create highly effective and measureable campaigns for a fraction of the cost of traditional media," she said.

She also appreciated the hands-on nature of the project. "Anytime I have the opportunity to learn by doing, I find the quality and depth of knowledge gained to be infinitely greater."