Student-staffed marketing firm raising success of real-world clients

KENNESAW, Ga. | Jul 1, 2025

Ground Work
Among marketing firms in the Atlanta area, Ground Work Agency is a relative newcomer that stands out for its dual mission of helping clients grow, while helping its own staff hone their professional skills while they’re still in college.

Based in the Coles College of Business, Department of Marketing and Professional Sales, the agency is providing marketing services to an expanding variety of businesses and other organizations, while serving as a training ground for its staff, who are all Ƶ State University students.

Like any college student, the employees of Ground Work Agency juggle responsibilities like midterms, finals, and class projects, things that don’t burden their full-time counterparts. However, their work is professional and impressive.

Since taking on its first clients in 2023, Ground Work Agency has been steadily growing its portfolio, which includes clients within the university and outside organizations across metro Atlanta and as far away as Wisconsin. 

Laurie Michaelson, lecturer of marketing in the Coles College, brought the idea for a faculty-guided, student-run marketing firm from her previous job teaching at the University of Florida, where students staff The Agency at UF.

Fulfilling a need

Marketing can be expensive, and top firms in big cities command fees ranging from thousands to millions of dollars for their work. A student-run agency like Ground Work makes professional marketing services accessible for clients that don’t have giant advertising budgets.

One of Ground Work Agency’s first clients was the Department of Secondary and Middle Grades Education in Ƶ’s Bagwell College of Education, where chair Megan Adams needed help reaching teachers considering going back to school for an advanced degree.

“Our department hired the marketing group to create a campaign for our Education Specialist in Curriculum and Instruction program,” Adams said. “Their ‘Why Not Now’ campaign has been hugely successful; our enrollment increased due to their work.”

Ground Work staff working with Adams and her team came up with the campaign theme, created a strategy to use paid digital advertising, direct mail, and social media to spread the word about the Education Specialist program and enrollment deadlines, and then executed those tactics on behalf of the client.

Following up on that successful campaign, Ground Work is planning a new effort with photos and testimonials of Bagwell College graduates that will go out via email to teachers in the schools where these alumni work.

“When the testimonial piece hits their inbox, they’ll think, ‘Wait a minute, I know that teacher,’” Michaelson said. “So, hopefully, we’ll see even more of an impact from that.”

Adams said working with the students on the marketing campaign has been beneficial in ways beyond increased program enrollment.

“We are also learning a great deal from the students on how we need to create a presence in order to entice teachers to return to school for an advanced degree,” she said. “We believe in the power of education to impact lives. It has been particularly rewarding to work with college students to create marketing via a student group and see how it is impacting their work and their studies.”

There are nearly 900 miles between Ƶ and Oshkosh, Wisconsin, but Ground Work Agency has helped nonprofit The Learning Collaborative establish its brand identity, according to executive director Lea Kitz.

The Learning Collaborative helps children and adults who struggle with reading, writing and math to perform better in those areas. The Ground Work Agency team created the organization’s logo, marketing materials, and website design.

“The students really worked to understand our organization and create a look that matches our style and the messaging we want to put out there,” Kitz said. Staff were open and responsive to feedback and this has been a wonderful, collaborative experience. “The Ground Work Agency presented ideas we wouldn’t have thought of, and our branding plan is much more comprehensive than we would have created on our own. As a nonprofit with a very small budget, this partnership has been a real gift.”

Learning by doing

Solange Aniekwu, agency director for Ground Work, has been with the firm since its earliest days, starting as agency coordinator.

“I did lots of process stuff, because I didn't really have a lot of marketing knowledge at the time,” said the Fayetteville, Georgia native who is majoring in marketing and leading a team of 17 staff servicing a growing list of clients.

Students who make up Ground Work’s staff can be found most days on the fourth floor of the Burruss Building. The space allows them to work together on projects for clients within arm’s reach of their advisors, Michaelson and lecturer of marketing John Doughney.

On Monday mornings, the staff gathers with Michaelson and Doughney to discuss progress and challenges on existing work. Michaelson stands at the front of the glass-walled conference room inside the fourth floor 3D-printing suite. On a video monitor, she takes the team through a long list of projects, and team members give updates.

Not all members of Ground Work’s staff are marketing majors, or even students in the Coles College, Michaelson said. Marketing needs writers, photographers, videographers, designers, and more, so the agency has attracted students from the Radow College of Humanities and Social Sciences, as well as the Geer College of the Arts.

Ƶ State emphasizes the value of its students learning by doing, often through internships. For Ground Work staff, their jobs are like a year-round internship where they get to design websites and ads, produce videos, create social media content and more.

Jasmine Duffy, a 2024 Ƶ graduate, said the experience she gained through Ground Work helped her find a job.

“I can't express the gratitude I have for Laurie because she was always there to encourage us and teach us how an agency works in real life,” Duffy said. “We would fall sometimes, but that’s part of learning to be a professional. In the real world you have to adjust, and that’s a lesson I took with me from Ground Work Agency.”

This article also appears in the of Summit Magazine.

– Story by Gary Tanner

Photos by Matt Yung

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A leader in innovative teaching and learning, Ƶ State University offers undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral degrees to its more than 47,000 students. Ƶ State is a member of the University System of Georgia with 11 academic colleges. The university’s vibrant campus culture, diverse population, strong global ties, and entrepreneurial spirit draw students from throughout the country and the world. Ƶ State is a Carnegie-designated doctoral research institution (R2), placing it among an elite group of only 8 percent of U.S. colleges and universities with an R1 or R2 status. For more information, visit kennesaw.edu.