Collaborating with Eye Corps gave Derby Entrepreneurship Center students much more than just hands-on marketing experience
The work of teammates Abem Fetene, Joseph Moon, Hope Nardone, Madison Page, and Melinda Yung (shown top and bottom, left to right) reflects the central aim of the Entrepreneurial Marketing course: to give students real-world experience tackling marketing challenges organizations face.
On one side of a video call sat five students in Jack Derby’s Entrepreneurial Marketing class. On the other side, calling in from Tanzania, were members of Eye Corps, a nonprofit that coordinates with local surgeons to combat cataract blindness through expanded access to cataract care
The students presented a semester’s worth of work they’d done with and for Eye Corps. They delivered a pitch deck, website recommendations, as well as samples of donor communications, newsletter content, and blog posts, and summarized how they had helped Eye Corps secure a Google Ad Grant valued at up to $10,000 a month. Staff members asked questions, offered feedback, and discussed how the organization would put the work to use.
“Presenting everything together allowed us to see what the collaboration had produced and how Eye Corps could carry it forward,” says Madison Page, E26, who co-led the student team.
“At a certain point, it stopped feeling like a class assignment,” adds Joseph Moon, an Innovation and Management master’s student at Tufts Gordon Institute in the School of Engineering and co-captain of the team.
“We became invested in doing the best work we could because we believed in what Eye Corps was trying to accomplish,” says Moon.
Marketing Theory, Turned into Practice
The Eye Corps partnership reflects the central aim of the Entrepreneurial Marketing course: giving students real-world experience tackling the marketing challenges organizations face. Working in teams, students partner with companies and nonprofits, learn about their goals and audiences, and develop strategies and materials tailored to an organization’s specific needs.
For their project, Page and Moon worked alongside teammates Abem Fetene, A26, Hope Nardone, A27, and Melinda Yung, A27. Together, with a diversity of perspectives drawn from degrees ranging from biomedical engineering to economics and psychology and international relations, the team approached the project much as a consulting group would, meeting regularly with its founder Susan MacDonald, A22P, and her colleagues, setting priorities, and dividing the work according to their interests, skills, and experience.
Eye Corps founder Susan MacDonald examines a patient. The central aim of the Entrepreneurial Marketing course is to give Tufts students real-world experience tackling the marketing challenges faced by organizations like Eye Corps.
That practical support was precisely what MacDonald, who is an associate professor of ophthalmology at Tufts University School of Medicine, had been looking for when she reached out for help to Jack Derby. She knew Eye Corps needed guidance in strengthening its marketing and fundraising communications, and she felt sure that the students in Derby’s course could take on the work thoughtfully. She was already familiar with his approach to teaching—Derby is a professor of the practice within the Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts Gordon Institute—and felt that it echoed the nonprofit’s own mentorship model.
“I’ve been a teacher my whole life, and mentorship is what Eye Corps is built on,” MacDonald says. “We place Tanzanian surgeons at the table as the primary operators, with our U.S. surgeons beside them as mentors. Jack’s course works from the same principle: Students are given real responsibility, while he guides them through work that has genuine stakes.”
Building Lasting Tools
The team began with an extended discovery meeting, then continued with weekly conversations about Eye Corps’ audiences, partnerships, goals, and funding needs. Rather than focus on a short-term boost in visibility, the students wanted to leave the nonprofit with systems and materials it could continue using.
“We kept asking what we could build that would still be useful after we were gone,” Moon says. “The goal was to give Eye Corps a foundation it could keep building on.”
Each student took responsibility for a different part of that effort. Page focused on Eye Corps’ relationships with in-kind donors, speaking with representatives from partner organizations and considering how Eye Corps could strengthen relationships with them.
The experience broadened her understanding of marketing. “I came away seeing how thoroughly marketing shapes an organization’s work,” says Page. “It affects how you communicate with donors and partners and how much support you’re able to attract.”
Moon drew on his user-experience background to recommend website revisions and consider how the site could be found through conventional search engines and generative AI tools. Nardone developed plans and content for Eye Corps’ newsletters and blog, while Yung helped revise the pitch deck. Fetene, who had interned with Google for four years, guided the organization through the process of applying for the Google Ad Grant.
The team’s work went beyond individual deliverables. Through their weekly conversations, the students helped Eye Corps clarify the larger story it wanted donors to understand. They pushed the organization to show not only that cataract surgery restores one person’s sight, but also how that change can alter an entire household’s life.
“When the breadwinner of a Tanzanian family loses his or her vision to cataracts, income stops and children may leave school to become caregivers,” MacDonald says. “The Tufts team made that chain visible and insisted that we put it at the center of what we say to donors.”
Doing Good Now
As the students helped Eye Corps communicate that broader impact, they also began to understand the mission more vividly themselves. Moon especially remembers the stories MacDonald shared from Tanzania, including accounts of patients who began dancing after cataract surgery, newly able to see the ground beneath them and move without fear of falling.
“Dancing is a big part of my own life, so that image stayed with me,” he says. “It captured the freedom and joy that can come from something we often take for granted.”
For Page, the project showed how technical skills and business thinking could be applied in service of a mission. “You may enter a class project expecting to learn a set of marketing tools,” she says. “But when you believe in the organization, you become much more invested in whether the work actually helps it reach the people who need it.”
The work has continued beyond the final presentation, as the students hoped it would. As Eye Corps prepares to expand into additional regions at the request of Tanzania’s Ministry of Health, MacDonald says the students’ frameworks are being incorporated into the nonprofit’s work.
“This wasn’t an academic exercise,” she says. “The students helped us sharpen the case for funding, and we’re now using that work in our donor outreach and foundation proposals.”
The partnership also continued in a more personal way. After the course ended, Fetene joined Eye Corps as a marketing consultant. When MacDonald asked why he wanted to remain involved, his answer captured what the experience had made possible.
Fetene’s response to MacDonald? “I wanted to do good now, not wait until I could afford to do it.”
