Good coffee. Good cause.
By Wendi Wheeler '06
Augsburg MBA students completed an assignment and got much more than a grade out of it. They got some great coffee and the good feeling that comes from giving back.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could complete a project for your graduate school class, earn a passing grade, and help someone else in the process? That is what happened for a group of Augsburg MBA students. Their management consulting capstone—an online marketing research project—has the potential to help one incredible organization and at least 1,500 young people in Minneapolis.
When it came time for Lynn Harris,
Darren Chaloner, and Kelly Ambourn to
choose an organization to work with for
their MBA project, they wanted to move
beyond the obvious choices. Harris says
they wanted to help a local social enterprise,
so she did a bit of research and
found CityKid Java.
CityKid Java is a local for-profit coffee
company located off Lake Street in
Minneapolis’ Phillips and Central neighborhoods.
Every dollar of their profit is returned
to the community, specifically to
their non-profit partner, the Urban Ventures
Leadership Foundation’s youth programs.
Urban Ventures’ youth programs
provide mentoring, athletic teams, camps,
leadership experience, and after-school
programs for at-risk inner city youth. In
2010, CityKid Java gave $80,000 to
Urban Ventures.
The team worked closely with Mark-
Peter Lundquist, CityKid’s founder and
vice president of Urban Ventures; Jenifer
Hagness, general manager of CityKid; and board member Joyce
Hansen. They asked what CityKid needed, outlined the deliverables,
and went to work.
Hagness says the team provided marketing research and recommended
tools and resources that CityKid could begin using
immediately. “When they came to us, we really gave them a
blank slate in terms of the website. We thought we knew some
things about our market and our customers, but they really gave
us some great tools and resources,” Hagness says. Ultimately the
team developed a Web 2.0 marketing plan including a social
media strategy for increasing traffic and sales and building
awareness on the CityKid website.
Harris says she was excited to see how their ideas could help
the organization. CityKid took the team’s information, moved
ahead with their recommendations, and even dedicated an employee
as their “chief listening officer” to focus on social media.
Harris says CityKid also invited the team back to share feedback
and the action plan they created based on the team’s work. “We
didn’t see this as just a project,” Harris says. “We really took this
to heart.”
Throughout the six-month project, Lundquist and Hagness treated
the MBA group as a part of their team. “They were very open to questions
and made our job a thousand times easier,” says Chaloner. The
students were invited to sit in on board meetings and tour Urban Ventures’ facilities. Harris says she even joined Lundquist and Hagness at
a local roasters “cupping” experience.
This project, however, had a much greater return on investment for
the students. In addition to gaining consulting experience and practical
application of marketing research principles, the team had an opportunity
to give back to their community. They bought the coffee, of course,
but they also shared the story of CityKid Java with their classmates,
family, and friends. “You can’t work with CityKid Java and not tell the
story,” Chaloner says.
So that is what Harris and Chaloner have continued to do even after their project was complete—tell the story of CityKid Java. It’s one of good coffee for a good cause and the opportunity to get a good grade while working with great people.
Real world setting. Real value.
The courses in the Augsburg MBA program are designed
to prepare students with content knowledge
and theoretical application. The MBA consulting project
puts this into practice in a real-world setting. To
be successful in the management consulting project,
students have to crystallize their knowledge into the
real demands and needs of an existing for-profit, not for-
profit, or community service organization—they
must use their education to be of service to an organization.
This is where their learning becomes real,
and of real value, in the world.
Students have worked with a broad spectrum of
companies from Fortune 100 companies to much
smaller organizations such as local theaters and
charter schools to individual entrepreneurs starting a
company. About half of the recent projects have been
with local nonprofits that serve the local communities
within Minneapolis and St. Paul.
