Suffolk Weighs into UFC Boston

In a little bit over a month, my class of roughly 40 Suffolk University business students planned, executed, and debriefed a strategic marketing plan. We used the hashtag #SuffolkWeighsIn at the UFC weigh-ins, in Boston, Massachusetts to collect over 200,000 insights on our website.

Our goal was simply to put Suffolk University on the map.

When people think of colleges in Boston, they think of Harvard, MIT, Boston University, etc. All of which are amazing schools, but what people don’t think about are schools like Suffolk University. Every year, Suffolk produces hundreds of graduates with bachelor's or masters in their fields. The difference between Suffolk students and students from the more prestigious colleges of Boston is that we are scrappy! We take what we can get, and we make the most out of everything. 

To prove that we are a group of the most hardworking students in Boston, my digital marketing class put together a campaign to get people to know Suffolk. We all formed teams and each person had a task. We had a branding and identity team, a digital marketing team, a guerilla marketing team, a public relations team, and a social media marketing team. My task was to create a short recap video with the footage we got at the event.

The day of the event, my class along with volunteers from other Suffolk classes and alumni, all gathered in Sargent Hall, decked out in Suffolk gear. In the heart of Downtown Boston, we all sorted out the final details of what we each wanted to achieve. We had fat heads of all the local fighters, Joe Lauzon, Randy Costa, Kyle Bochniak, Charles Rosa, Manny Bermudez, and one for Dana White. We had posters that said Suffolk loves UFC and Team Carrier. As we all gathered, I began to collect footage, with the help of alumna Marley Kepano.

We took the short walk around the corner to The Orpheum Theater, to watch the weigh-ins and cheer for the local fighters. As we continued to film, Marley and I found out we couldn’t have a camera in the theater unless we had a press pass. Being the scrappy kids that we are, we put the camera away and started to film on our phones instead.

Throughout the entire event, Suffolk got the attention of multiple local fighters, Dana White, and a few local TV channels. By this point, our final goal was to get 100,000 insights on a landing page we had made for the campaign. We blasted what we were doing on social media under our hashtag and tried to get the family of the fighters and Dana White to use our hashtag.

After the weigh-ins, we all went back to Suffolk to review what we did and what we could have done better. To wrap up our campaign, we did a live stream on our professor’s Instagram account, which Dana White eventually joined to thank us for supporting his fighters.

After the weigh-ins, the clock started ticking for Marley and I.

Fight night was the next day at 9 pm and we were determined to finish the video by then. After a very sleepless night and long hours in the library, we put the final product on YouTube, five minutes before the fights started.

The week after in class we debriefed how we did. We attributed our biggest strength to the connections our professor had to the UFC and to Dana White whereas our weaknesses included an uneven distribution of energy within our team and that we threw a lot of things together at the last minute. Our biggest opportunity was that we could have done more to get the attention of bigger media outlets in Boston. Some threats we faced were the workload we were getting from other professors and the classic New England bad weather. We closed the debriefing by looking at the stats of our page and we crushed our goal and doubled the insights we were looking to get.

Personally, I feel like I gained a lot from this experience. I pushed myself to my creative limit in a specific time frame and I was proud of what we had created in the end. I learned the difference between what it looks like to be someone who brings 75% of their best to the table versus someone who brings 110%.

I want to be someone who brings their best to everything. I want the people that believe in me to know that I’m out here giving it all I have.