The Dance Marathon at University of Michigan is a student run non-profit that raised $388,000 for pediatric rehabilitation programs in the 2009 academic year. Prior to coming to work with our student teams at EMU's College of Business, Dance Marathon's marketing efforts were focused principally on attracting dancers for their 30 hour marathon event, doing donation drives at sporting events, and other fund raising outreach.

However, the organization's mission is broader than just fund raising. One of the principal groups benefiting from Dance Marathon's efforts is autistic children. The student team in our initial AdWords  course last Winter identified an opportunity to reach out to parents of autistic children and executed a very successful advertising campaign on that premise that was attracting 7000 monthly visitors as of Fall 2009.

The question for students this term then was how to design landing pages for this campaign that parents of autistic children would find useful. As detailed in the presentation at the top of this post, this term's students:

• Analyzed intent for visitors drawn to the AdWords autism campaign based on search terms and ad text.
• Worked with Dance Marathon to understand their goals. It should be noted that these goals evolved as the student project progressed such that Dance Marathon developed an autism blog specifically targeted at parents of autistic children half way through the project.
• Developed and tested alternative landing page designs to address the concerns of parents of autistic children and allow them to engage with relevant resources provided by Dance Marathon.

With the best student landing page design, the Dance Marathon is now able to draw 10% of the AdWords autism campaign visitors  to further engage with the Dance Marathon autism blog, compared with 0% at the start of the project. This is a great initial step for increasing Dance Marathon's engagement with the beneficiaries of their efforts. However, we believe it should be possible to increase this engagement significantly further still, and the Dance Marathon will be working with the student team again in the Winter 2010 semester.

The student team for the Fall 2009 term consisted of:

• Katie Bertram
• Robert Brown
• Chris Onofrio