Touchstone Center for Crafts

Founded in 1972, Touchstone’s mission is to advance excellence in the arts and crafts by educating and encouraging individuals to develop technical skills, good design, and innovative expression. Students were tasked with creating a sustainable program that would bring groups of professionals to the Center, launching a new revenue stream. They designed team-building activities based on themes like cooperation and teamwork for the Center to host organization events.

• Students: Shiqi Yang, Dhruv Seth, Muxi Qian, Ce Liu
• Executive Coach: Bill Slivka

Prism

PRISM is an organization for international students and their families that focus on making their experience in Pittsburgh as enjoyable, memorable, and fun as possible. The student team crafted a content strategy and a content management system to effectively monitor all content marketing efforts. They paid particular attention to creating budget and user-friendly options.

• Students: Ramya Parameswaran Rungta, Woohyuk Choi, Feng Chi Liu, Sarthak Gupta
• Executive Coach: Allison Duncan

Footbridge

Footbridge for Families, founded in 2019, supports families facing financial crises without having to engage with child protective services, winning the BNY Mellon’s social innovation challenge. Students were asked to implement a ROI model to improve the performance of a call center management tool. They concentrated on creating a tool that the client could view and analyze responses to surveys distributed to clients, including documentation and training.

• Students: Akshay Agarwal, Chia-Ying Chueh, Xinyue Xia, Haotian Zhang
• Executive Coach: Mat Greener

Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh

The Jewish Federation cultivates resources, connects people, and collaborates across the community to live and fulfill Jewish values, welcoming community members of all abilities, backgrounds, races, religious affiliations, sexual orientations, and gender expressions. The scope for this team was to develop KPIs and metrics to evaluate the performance of an annual event (Shinshinim). As a result, they developed an analysis of the year’s program performance, along with template questionnaires, data analysis models, and impact reports.

• Students: Alexander de Almeida, Mengyan Zhang, Fnu Lajvanti, Ximiao Yu
• Executive Coach: Pritam Advani

Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera (CLO)

Pittsburgh CLO is a not-for-profit cultural organization dedicated to the preservation, creation, and promotion of the American musical theater art form, the furnishing of arts education, and providing outreach and meaningful community service opportunities in Western Pennsylvania and throughout the United States. The student team focused on the CLO’s Construction Center, which rents out and stores theater set pieces. They provided a plan for the company’s social media operations and assistance in establishing an inventory system.

• Students: Zhaoyang Feng, Yongha Jang, Tejasvi Kamble, Radhika Arora
• Executive Coach: Rob Russell

Meerkat Village

Meerkat Village is an innovative, new app designed to empower families and integrate service provisions for children with social, emotional, behavioral, and medical needs. The Katz student team created a customized three-year pro forma financial projection, a detailed framework aimed to assure seed round investors of Meerkat’s financial viability, and a revenue-sharing structure designed to boost business-to-consumer (B2C) sales and benefit both the organizations and affiliate partners.

• Students: Mohit Dewan, Tianze Li, Wei Ru Yang, Wu Yuhang
• Executive Coach: Ankur Goel

Hot Metal Bridge Faith Community

Founded in 2004, the Hot Metal Bridge Faith Community is a Pittsburgh-based organization located in the South Side that embarks on an intentional journey of cultivating connection and a vision to eliminate hunger and homelessness in Pittsburgh. These students aimed to help the organization fund the construction of an accessible mental health counseling room. They created a detailed grant proposal​ with a specific budget breakdown, metrics to measure impact, and a customized implementation plan with actionable steps.

• Students: Nausheen Fatima, Shuang Wu, Chen Jin, Abhishek Suman
• Executive Coach: Andrew Brennan

Bona Fide Bellevue

Bona Fide Bellevue, originated by an enthusiastic group of citizens in 2008, created a strategic plan to facilitate community involvement and reinvigorate Bellevue to make it the most sought-after neighborhood in Pittsburgh. This organization needed assistance managing different aspects of its operations. The Katz team studied a few different customer relationship management (CRM) offerings and gave a final recommendation to the organization.

• Students: Divya Singh, Rashi Rathore, Kaushik Madgula, Ruyu Yan
• Executive Coach: Theresa Gallick

Meals on Wheels

Previously this nonprofit (NGO) was only able to accept cash or check payments for meal delivery services. With the assistance of the Katz student team, the organization introduced an online payment system that both made ordering food for the elderly easier and supported back-end accounting process improvement for volunteers.

• Students: Jialiang Shi, Yuanjie Jin, Yuyi Ma, and Shuya Yang
• Executive Coach: Bud Smith

Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank – Project #1

This SAP-funded team refined a Food Insecurity Index – identifying areas with high food insecurity but low food supply coverage. This included developing new census-block-level metrics to assess and model need. Check out their final presentation, which won them the 2022 Super Analytics Challenge.

• Students: Rachael Agnello, William Hoffenkamp, Bhavya Mehta, and Yuyao Wu
• Executive Coach: Harrison Urash

Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank – Project #2

To better serve the southwestern Pennsylvania area and meet food security needs, this student team worked alongside Food Bank staff to recommend incremental improvements for technology platforms use. Solutions included integrating their geographic information systems (Esri) with customer relationship management (Salesforce) systems.

• Students: Yuanzhe Ye, Ziwei Zhao, Zichun Wang, and Dominic Boito
• Executive Coach: Christopher Barlow

Moonshot Museum

The soft launch of this new ‘out of this world’ museum housed at Astrobotics in Pittsburgh – with the mission to immerse visitors in what lunar colonization will look like –  required some mass communication support to share the opening plan. The Katz student team developed a social media marketing plan to support the opening in fall 2022.

• Students: Max Cherpinsky, Wen-Che Hung, Chia-Yi Lu, and Kaizhi Lu
• Executive Coach: Bill Slivka

Hot Metal Bridge Community Faith Community

Building on a successful 2021 project, the student team helped prepare a successful grant proposal for cold refrigerationstorage – with the goal to increase the number of meals served at this food pantry. The new storage is expected to be installed fall 2022.

• Students: Kiki Parker, Lei Xue, Shuying Yin, and Ying Zhao
• Executive Coach: Connie Palucka

PHRQL

This team worked with this local start-up to model a business case to deliver specialized diets for people with diabetes. The analysis included partnering strategies with healthcare  providers and dieticians.

• Students: Victor Bench, Yue Pan, Xinyi Wu, and Enkhjargal Ganbaatar
• Executive Coach: Pritam Advani

Innovate PGH

The team provided recommendations on how Innovate PGH may drive value and differentiate services for the life sciences start-up community in the Oakland Corridor, given the high level of research output and entrepreneurial activity from the University of Pittsburgh.

• Students: Shauna Chen, Shivanandan Rajarathnam, Muntasir Chowdhury, and Yuguang Wang
• Executive Coach: Pritam Advani

Pediatric Palliative Care Coalition (PPCC)

A newly developed palliative care information mobile app for parents of children, the Katz student team prepared a market and financial model feasibility review. They provided a realistic assessment for the PPCC’s Board of Directors on the distribution trends based on the current operating model.

• Students: Breanna Wallbaum, Chun Zhao, Susan Jiang, and Zhenhao Yan
• Executive Coach: Jack Brice

Heinz History Center 

Based on the positive impact of the 2020 project, the Katz student team generated a go-to-market plan for the museum to increase merchandise revenue on Pittsburgh memorabilia, such as nostalgic Heinz Pickle Pins and Mr. Fred Rogers related items. This included specific pricing, product, promotion, and marketing channel recommendations.

• Students: Chahee Park, Wenjing Mao, Miyi Liu, and Chenxi Zhang
• Executive Coach: Bill Slivka

University of Pittsburgh Nationality Rooms

Founded in 1921 and now a historic site, the 31 Nationality Rooms in the Cathedral of Learning attract 30,000 visitors annually. The Katz Team examined ways to improve the customer experience for tours including developing new pricing, adapting new technology, and directing visitors to the gift shop.

• Students: Esther Chung, Yi Tian, Yile Zhang, and Ning Zheng
• Executive Coach: Bud Smith

Hot Metal Bridge Community Faith Community

From a fellowship award from Accenture Inc., through the Super Analytics Challenge, this student team coordinated with Atlanta-based nonprofit Love Beyond Walls to bring portable handwashing sinks to this SouthSide food pantry. Supporting the homeless community during the pandemic was the desired impact. Read more about this project here.

• Students: Carlos Gil, Rebecca Farabaugh, Xingyu Li, and Tianyang Xie
• Executive Coach: Joe Bozada

Pittsburgh Business Group on Health (PBGH)

Katz students built a “Get Back to Work” roadmap risk assessment model with constraints to manage operations through the COVID-19 pandemic. This was for the benefit of PBGH member companies.

• Students: Tong Zhao, Parul Sharma, Tinghe Cao, Jinyu Yang, and Patrick Savage
• Executive Coach: Joe Bozada

Phipps Conservatory & Botanical Gardens

The Katz team consulted on how to introduce a global sustainability toolkit developed by Phipps and shared globally with gardens. This included improving the website capability and design – to support the distribution of the toolkit.

• Students: Uma Thoota, Xinyi Tan, Kaihong Wang, Yitian He, and Daniel King
• Executive Coach: Doug Harding

The Boy Scouts of America

Katz students supported a streamlined annual fee payment process and structure to better collect and distribute funds to troops. This included implementing a new payment gateway (PNC’s Payeezy).

• Students: Andrey Popkov, Xinming Ruan, Chengchen Wang, Johnson Bandi, and Haohan Wang
• Executive Coach: Phil Brooks

Heinz History Center 

This Katz team supported the foundational-level analysis and recommendation of e-commerce channel strategies for new brand licensing opportunities for the museum., This included recommending e-store sales strategies.

• Students: Matt Bonidie, Chenxi Xu, Shali Qian, Donyu Bai, and Darshi Mehta
• Executive Coach: Bill Besselman

Pittsburgh Botanical Garden 

Katz students evaluated the effectiveness of pricing strategies, specifically, making recommendations on the effectiveness and profitability of promotional programs involving Groupon.

• Students: Yi Zeng, Jing Wang, Ryan Dockery, Yuxiao Jiang, & Siddharth Srivastava
• Executive Coach: Don Wieczenski

Association for Corporate Growth (ACG)

Katz students helped develop a business plan to grow the ACG membership across the Pittsburgh region, including the development of a membership promotion plan.

• Students: Anqi Zhang, Di Huang, Zihui Huang, Tyler Guerrieri, & Boris Kulizhnikov
• Executive Coach: Whit Little

Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra

With the pandemic temporarily shuttering Heinz Hall, the Katz team consulted on how to digitally open the doors to the world. This project included a web optimization plan to pull together content and audiences for the orchestra.

• Students: Jenny Chen, Brittany Knight, Ji Yoon Kim, Weiming Ding & Raunaq Lala
• Executive Coach: Amy Dubin

Pittsburgh Festival Opera

The Katz team researched and recommended on-demand video platforms to connect young artists with broader communities during the pandemic. They also developed a monetization and marketing plan.

• Students: Ani Roy, Lan Yu, Xingchen Yao, Shen Tian and Cong Han
• Executive Coach: Kip Soteres

American Red Cross

Many immigrant populations new to the United States are tight-knit enclosed communities – small islands in our larger societal fabric. The Katz team identified such populations and recommended communication strategies for the American Red Cross to connect with them for emergency support.

• Students: Victoria Hoang, Chuanhao Mei, Malena Hirsch, Jingting Zhou & Xiaowen Dong
• Executive Coach: Pritam Advani

Veterans Place

This nonprofit was considering offering mental health services in addition to shelter support for military veterans. The Katz team conducted a thorough break-even analysis to determine if this was financially feasible.  

• Students: Anthony Perry, Cheng Chen, Wei-chun Hsieh, Jordan McBride, & Shubham Kishore
• Executive Coach: Brian Daniels