For their capstone consulting project a team of second-year students in Dr. Balbirer’s MBA 629: Creating and Sustaining Competitive Advantage developed a marketing plan for the Charlie Poole Music Festival.

The traditional music festival is named in tribute to musical icon, Charlie Poole, who is famous for popularizing the three-fingered picking technique of banjo playing and whose final resting place is in Eden, North Carolina, the former textile mill town that now hosts the annual festival.

At their presentation on April 6 the Bryan MBA team presented strategies for increasing public awareness and attendance through several promotional initiatives and introduced a newly designed ticketing price structure. They also provided long-term recommendations to enhance the festival’s brand equity and designed a survey instrument to collect data for future market analysis.

“I wanted to develop a marketing plan for my capstone project and developing one for a nonprofit organization seemed both challenging and rewarding. Nonprofits have limited resources to achieve noble causes and Piedmont Folk Legacies is not an exception. Their mission to preserve North Carolina’s cultural heritage through the Charlie Poole Music Festival gave our team the incentive to put all our skills into practice to come up with a plan that would allow them to do this effectively and at the lowest possible cost,” says Lina Aristizabal, one of the three students on the consulting team.

The team was one of two provided by the Bryan School this semester to assist Piedmont Folk Legacies, the parent organization for the festival, with marketing its efforts. Professor Janice Knapp divided Bryan MSITM students in her course, ISM: 603: Web Design and Development, into two teams and had them redesign the web site for the music festival and present their work to the nonprofit as their final project for the course.

This spring semester has been the latest chapter in an ongoing relationship with the Bryan School of Business and Economics and Piedmont Folk Legacies.

For the past four semesters graduate students from the Bryan MBA and MSITM programs have been assisting Piedmont Folk Legacies with the preservation of North Carolina’s cultural heritage while at the same time serving as a vehicle for economic development to a once prosperous textile town.

Prior consulting work includes a business plan for a national banjo museum and the development of a virtual banjo center done in collaboration between students in the Bryan MSITM program who handled the technical development of the site and graduate students from the School of Music who provided the site’s content.

"Our partnership with the Bryan School at UNCG has provided resources not readily available to our nonprofit, and at an exceptional level of expertise. I was impressed with the fact that the students not only provided sound business advice, but also immersed themselves in our special circumstances in order to give concrete advice particular to our needs,” says Louis W. Price, President of Piedmont Folk Legacies and UNCG alumna.

The consulting work is scheduled to continue into at least a third academic year next fall when a team of Bryan MBAs will begin a feasibility study to assess the long-term sustainability of a permanent national banjo center.

The 2009 Charlie Poole Music Festival is being held June 12-14 at the Fairgrounds in Eden, North Carolina. More information is available at http://www.charlie-poole.com/.

-May 2009