Marketing Students Give to the Homeless Through Soleful Giving

(photo: Marketing professor Rubina Malik (fourth from left) and her students)

Many of the 6,700 Atlanta residents homeless, living in shelters or transitional housing go without some of the basic necessities of everyday life, such as shoes.

This semester, marketing professor Rubina Malik decided to make it a teachable situation for her students.

Following her teaching philosophy of relating classroom lessons to issues in the community, her students launched the Soleful Giving Initiative.

“They were assigned the task of creating, marketing and managing a shoe-drive campaign that would collect shoes for the homeless and less fortunate around Atlanta,” Malik said.

Her students collected more than 500 pairs of shoes, which they will donate to Crossroads Community Ministries.

Using the branding and marketing techniques they learned in class, the students created an interactive website that assisted with campus donations, user testing surveys that furthered their understanding of their demographic, and social media marketing that spread awareness throughout the Atlanta University Center and other schools, including Georgia State University. Incentives were created through a rewards program that issued certificates thanking the individual for their donations.

Malik said the lessons learned were as much about a man of Morehouse’s obligation to be a servant leader as they were about marketing.

“When I see a sparkle in my students’ eyes, I know I have ignited a flame of passion within their hearts,” she said. “I want to help them blaze paths of excellence through unchartered territories, not only for themselves, but as paragons for their peers and the community to look up to.”

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