Students in Colorado State University Assistant Professor Christina Minihan’s JTC 355 advertising class gained real-life experience this semester as they assisted business owner Logan Stagg with promoting his business startup STAGG Electric.

STAGG Electric does residential electrical work, including diagnostic work, hot tub installation, outlets and switches and light fixtures, according to its website. Stagg has two years of experience and training with the Independent Electrical Contractors Rocky Mountain association and a master electrician license. He recently started his own business.

“I’ve spent the majority of that time doing remodel electrical work here in Fort Collins,” Stagg said. “I’ve been doing residential electrical for eight years now and want to continue doing that, but it’ll just be my own operation, which means I can do better prices that way — lower than the bigger companies that I used to work for.”

“I love to initiate service-learning projects for my students so they can have a real-world, hands-on learning experience. Any time an opportunity presents itself to help a local business thrive, I get excited because it creates a platform for my students to use their gifts to create and enhance a campaign to help businesses get off the ground or established businesses grow.” –Christina Minihan, CSU assistant professor 

Stagg met Minihan when he completed electrical work for her and was offered an opportunity for one of Minihan’s classes to assist him in getting his business started.

“When she hired me, I was just doing work on the side,” Stagg said. “I didn’t really have an official business, so it was just like, ‘I have a day job, and then after I’m done with that job, I just go and do side jobs.’ But I mentioned to her that I’m interested in turning that side job into more of an official business rather than just doing work on the side just trying to make it my full-time job. So she was really nice and offered to let students help me just create and grow my own side business and make it more official.”

Minihan got to work creating the service-learning project for her students to gain hands-on experience in advertising. Because STAGG Electric was so new, the students were able to be a part of the process from the beginning.

“I love to initiate service-learning projects for my students so they can have a real-world, hands-on learning experience,” Minihan said. “Any time an opportunity presents itself to help a local business thrive, I get excited because it creates a platform for my students to use their gifts to create and enhance a campaign to help businesses get off the ground or established businesses grow.

“It took some time, effort and trust on his part to work with a class size of 60 students. I was really proud of my students, as it was evident that they had put great effort, talent and heart into this project and, in the end, produced a wonderful advertising campaign.”

The class was divided into groups based on their interests, including copy editors, graphic design, photography, relationship builders and PR, advertising, social media, video and website design. Sophomore CSU student Sasha Sperry joined the web design group, which was responsible for creating a website using work the class created, including videos, photos and writing to make a cohesive website for the business.

“I will admit, we did struggle to find an exact format,” Sperry said. “We just wanted it to be perfect or at least really good. And eventually, what sort of brought it all together was picking one layout from the website that was just like free and generated and then adding photos, and then it all kind of came together after that.”

Another student, CSU senior Andrea Pennington, was in the relationship builders and PR advertising group. Pennington said the group was responsible for designing flyers and business cards as well as posting information on Nextdoor and at businesses around Fort Collins.

“We had a lot of freedom in this assignment, which I thought was awesome because it was allowing us to have the creativity that we had originally and put that towards what we wanted to create,” Pennington said. “Everything, of course, was approved by Logan. As always, when working with a client, there are going to be things that needed to change. So we had to make a few tweaks based on what (Stagg) wanted because it is his business, but we were really able to take creative control and make a product we thought looked good and fit the demographic.”

Students like sophomore Madelyn King also got to practice their editing skills in the copy editors’ group. This group reviewed the writing group’s work and checked the captions and writing on the website to make sure there were no errors and that the work portrayed who Stagg is.

“I would like to be an editor, so getting real experience with making sure that, essentially, a product is ready to be released, I feel like I can take that away (from the project),” King said.

The class was structured in a flipped style, allowing students to take the lead on the project, and included students of all grade levels. The students enjoyed the structure of Minihan’s class and appreciated getting hands-on experience.

“I think it gave a really unique perspective on what classes could look like here at CSU,” Pennington said. “I’ve never had that in any of my classes, but I think it was so unique and something … that I wish I would have had more of. … We had control over … how well we did in the class and like what we did and if we enjoyed it or not because we had full reign. (Stagg) was just there to supervise and guide as needed. And I think that that was so unique, I wish I could have experienced it more.”

Minihan is starting two new classes in the fall: RRM 355 and RRM 350, which will offer hands-on and service learning experiences. More information about the classes can be found on the website for “Cooking with Beer in Colorado,” a collaborative recipe book by Minihan, and more information about STAGG Electric can be found on their Instagram, website, YouTube and Facebook.

Reach Jordan Mahaffey at news@collegian.com or on Twitter @_MahaffeyJordan.