Suffolk in the Hub

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Kim Ring stands at a lectern scanning computer screens as members of her agency team await the start of an all-hands meeting. A nasty combination of mid-February snow, sleet, and rain have made for difficult travel in downtown Boston, but inside Samia 315 there’s a buzz in the air and an audible chatter among the two dozen team members who’ve already taken their seats, as more colleagues make their way into the room. “Pizza, pizza, pizza!” Ring bellows. “Grab some lunch. I’m getting texts that some people are running late.” A few attendees have grabbed a slice from boxes stacked at the back of the room, but it’s clear people are not here for the pizza. It’s the first in-person, all-agency meeting of the semester for Suffolk in the Hub, the innovative, student-run integrated marketing agency Ring founded in 2022, and you can feel the enthusiasm. It’s standing room only as a dozen more students file into the back of the room. They’ve come from all corners of campus during a break between classes to gather as a group and share client and agency updates. Ring kicks things off by asking students who are new to Suffolk in the Hub to stand. “Welcome to the Thunderdome,” she says. “Buckle up, kids. We’re going for a ride.” It’s hardly hyperbole. In the three years since Suffolk in the Hub launched, the agency has grown to about 50 students who, working on their own time and outside of their already significant academic coursework, have immersed themselves in the marketing challenges of a growing roster of clients. The students are deploying sophisticated communications and content strategies, tactics, and tools that would impress even the most seasoned of marketers. Hub clients, current and past, include the New England Free Jacks rugby team, Hotel AKA (formerly Nine Zero) in downtown Boston, Worcester-based sustainable coffee seller Twin Bee Coffee, Boston’s Improv Asylum comedy club, the South Shore Children’s Chorus, Boston Chinatown Tours, community-based healthcare provider NeighborHealth, and the Fair Housing Alliance of Massachusetts, among many others. The meeting is now in full swing, and senior Jillian Isenstadt, a global business and marketing major, rises to share an update on her client, the Free Jacks. Isenstadt is leading a team of six agency members working to expand awareness of the back-to-back champion Major League Rugby team. First, she shares that the Free Jacks have asked her to stay on as their senior intern, which sparks a spontaneous round of applause. “That’s been really helpful because it’s led us to this big list I got going on here,” Isenstadt tells the group. “We executed a media event a couple of Wednesdays ago. That went really well. We had some hits. We’re growing our media list. We’re writing press releases and media alerts, which never stops. We’re pitching influencers, we’re chasing partnerships. I’m getting a little ambitious—I did chase Dunkin’. I’m waiting to hear back on that.” Kajal Shah, a Sawyer Business School graduate student pursuing a master’s in marketing, stands and reports that her Suffolk in the Hub team has met with client Crafts Zone, a small craft studio with locations in Brookline and Natick, Massachusetts. Shah tells her colleagues that her team presented a marketing plan focused on search engine optimization and keyword analysis to improve Craft Zone’s web visibility. The team is also working on a fresh look for the brand as well as audience targeting strategies, loyalty programs, and promotions for special events such as Kids Night Out. Standing under a large overhead screen, Ring clicks through the presentation deck and offers praise as each team leader gives their update. Dressed in a white blouse, black vest, and matching black pants, Ring is a combination of agency chief, coach, cheerleader, and cool aunt. Her energy is vigorous and contagious, clearly mirrored in the response of her team members. “You are on fire this semester,” she tells the group. “I’ve never had so many meetings in my life! I don’t know how we’re doing it. I wake up every day, I’m on the treadmill and I’m wondering, ‘Are we keeping up?’ And we are. We haven’t missed a beat. The clients are super happy. I’m loving the vibe within the teams. There are 50 of you, and because you’ve all added me to your group texts, my texts are going nuts. It feels good, right?” Ring, an instructor of marketing in the Sawyer Business School, is an experienced practitioner who has run her own agency. Through Suffolk in the Hub, she has reverse-engineered the traditional intern-to-agency pathway by bringing an agency directly to students. Suffolk in the Hub is not a class, nor is it a simulated marketing firm. Rather, it is a fully functioning and integrated agency where students are auditing websites, building brands, pumping out press releases, driving social content, and tracking performance—and all the while burnishing their résumés and portfolios through real work with clients, including some that have recently begun paying for services. It’s experience that gives students a leg up with employers when they graduate—and even before. But through her stewardship of Suffolk in the Hub, Ring is doing something else for these students that goes beyond immersive learning and résumé polishing. She is building confidence and community—in a way that has left many of the student participants inspired and profoundly grateful. Embedded in Suffolk University’s mission is the power of transformational learning and community impact. The Hub brings that to life, and students who participate literally testify to it—sometimes with tears in their eyes.

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spring 2025

by Greg Gatlin Photography by Michael J. Clarke

Kim Ring (above), an instructor in marketing in the Sawyer Business School, launched Suffolk in the Hub in 2022 to give her students hands-on marketing experience with real-world clients.

—Kim Ring

Kim Ring grew up in suburban Wakefield outside of Boston. Her father was a Cambridge cop, her mother a bookkeeper. From the time she was little, she remembers having over-the-top creative ideas and a sense that she could sell things. “In junior high, we had to create board games, and I would just get so excited because I knew exactly what board games would sell,” she says. She was also drawn to storytelling. Inspired by President Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter Peggy Noonan, Ring thought she wanted to be a political speechwriter. She still remembers Reagan’s solemn address to the nation in 1986 following the space shuttle Challenger disaster, in which Noonan incorporated lines from the poem “High Flight.” The shuttle crew, Noonan wrote, had “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.” The problem was Ring couldn’t stand politics. When she went off to Seton Hall University in New Jersey at 17, she felt like “the typical Suffolk student.” She had to work to pay for college and would take a bus from the Seton Hall campus just outside Newark to her job at Wet Seal in the Livingston Mall. “It was really hard,” she says. “I wouldn’t get home until 10 at night. I was doing homework after that. I struggled.” Ring took a year off and worked at TGI Fridays. Eventually she went back to school, at Florida State, and studied public relations. Upon graduating she couldn’t land a PR job. She took an administrative position while continuing to bartend at night. Still wanting to pursue a PR career, she went for a graduate degree, this time at Emerson College in Boston, yet found herself in the same boat. “I came out of grad school with a master’s thinking, ‘Now I’m all set.’ But it was the same thing all over again. I applied to every PR firm. No one would hire me. I had no experience. I had all this debt. It was so discouraging.” That feeling stuck with her for years, planting seeds that would one day become Suffolk in the Hub. Ring found herself volunteering her PR services in search of experience. She worked for a year at a digital marketing startup where she learned to build websites before deciding to start her own agency, Ring Communications. “There was a point where I wasn’t making any money. I couldn’t pay my bills. I couldn’t afford a car, and I was walking everywhere.” That, too, stuck with her. When a morning radio host was looking for someone to promote a line of clothing, Ring took it on for free so she could meet reporters and build her portfolio. “I was grinding many, many years,” she says. “It was not easy to get clients. I’d never worked at a PR firm. So part of the whole first step was making connections with reporters so that they would know who I was.” Finally, she landed a restaurant client, and then another. When she reeled in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) as a client, it put her on the map. She picked up a Boston fitness club chain and found herself working with legendary Boston athletes like Pedro Martinez and Rob Gronkowski. Ring always thought she might teach. At Emerson, she worked on a group project with Ereni Markos, associate professor of marketing in the Sawyer Business School. They stayed connected on social media. In 2016, Markos reached out and suggested Ring talk to the dean about teaching social media marketing. She did, and then she added consumer behavior, integrated marketing, digital marketing, and first-year business courses. “I love it,” Ring says of teaching. “There is something about seeing things done differently than they were for me. Nobody gave a shit about me in college. The professors didn’t care. It just felt like you’d go into the lecture, take your tests, get your grades. There was no connection.” In her first year teaching at Suffolk, Ring invited one of her talented students to intern at Ring Communications. Each year, she would bring in others. “A part of me thought, ‘They really should have things like this in schools,” she says. During 2021, still in the midst of the COVID pandemic, Ring would regularly ask students how they were doing. “There was concern that they weren’t getting experience and weren’t going to get jobs,” Ring says. “I always had this idea. I built my company. Why couldn’t we build something like that within the four walls of Suffolk?” Ring took her idea to Marketing Department Chair Jane Zhu. Zhu responded: Just do it.

“I always had this idea: I built my company—why couldn’t we build something like that within the four walls of Suffolk?”

Suffolk in the Hub is not a class, but the learning is nonstop. Through their work with the integrated marketing agency, students like (from left) Ava Leombruno, Colin Sheehan, and Ava Silva are not only mastering high-level marketing strategies, tactics, and tools, they’re also building confidence and community.

A Winning Team

Sometimes in law, as in sports, deep benches lead to wins. When a client of Suffolk Law’s Health Law Clinic had his application for disability benefits denied, the law students managing his case called in two rookies for an assist. Under the supervision of Law Professor and Clinic Director Kate Gannon, third-year student attorneys Tiffany Whiles and Chelsea Jones were building a case to show that their client’s genetic condition was causing cognitive issues that require support—but the diagnosis itself was so rare that even reviewers at the Department of Disability Services were unlikely to be familiar with its effects. So they turned to Psychology Professor Sukanya Ray for help strengthening their client’s brief. As part of the service-learning component for Ray’s Organizational Psychology course, undergraduate psychology majors Chloe Allen, Class of 2027, and Jenna Greenspan, Class of 2026, took on the challenge of researching case studies that could clarify the link between the client’s condition and intellectual disabilities. Shaking off their initial nervousness, the pair pored over scientific literature to prepare a strong, evidence-based case, then presented it to Gannon, Whiles, and Jones. With their help, the client’s new legal brief was successful without even requiring a formal hearing—a very rare outcome that was a reflection of the students’ hard work, says Gannon. “The client shared with us that he has never felt so supported by a team of people committed to helping him get the services that he needs,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to help people,” says Greenspan. “This opportunity showed me a different road I could take.”

Jacqueline Church would prefer not to give up sleeping—more than she already has. Church runs Boston Chinatown Tours, a small company that offers visitors guided tours exploring Chinatown’s culture, history, and food. She has a high-level idea of how to grow her business. “But I don’t have the time to operationalize it,” she says. “There are only a certain number of hours in the day. “The idea of having someone help me figure out smart things to focus on, versus the things that might be fun but aren’t going to boost the business—these are things that I don’t have time to make happen on my own.” For Church, Suffolk in the Hub has been a godsend. At a client meeting in February, Rahul Agrawal and Yanisa Choksamai, both marketing graduate students, present Church with strategic recommendations to build awareness and increase bookings. Agrawal and Choksamai’s discovery process revealed some key differentiators and potential competitive advantages for Boston Chinatown Tours, which gets top ratings on Tripadvisor and has won Travelers’ Choice awards. Many competing foot tours of Boston do not offer the distinct blend of authentic culture and food, Agrawal tells Church. “Unlike other tours, you have a deep integration of food and history,” Agrawal notes. “You are showcasing over 30 authentic Chinese dishes with immersive storytelling, where visitors gain exclusive insights into Chinatown’s heritage and traditions.” The Hub team has tested some keywords and found that Boston Chinatown Tours is not ranking as well as it could. Among a slew of recommendations, they propose optimizing the website and leveraging social media. Choksamai suggests posting regular articles with topics such as “Chinatown Hidden Gems” or “Five Things You Don’t Know About Chinatown.” She also proposes a brand kit that includes a professional logo, a distinct color palette, and graphics that reinforce Chinatown’s cultural identity while making the tour’s brand instantly recognizable.

The expertise that Suffolk in the Hub students are bringing to clients like Boston Chinatown Tours and the others is advanced—which raises the question: Where are the students learning how to provide insights with this level of marketing sophistication? Ring has deployed what she calls a “mentor up” model. She teams graduate students who have some professional experience, and often act as project leads, with undergrads who learn from them. Ring also teaches many of the concepts and tools herself, and students are learning in other courses as well. “A lot of it comes from them teaching each other,” she says, which is how any good agency should work. That mentoring model works both ways. In a recent agency team pitch session on behalf of the Free Jacks, Suffolk in the Hub students and advisors tossed around ideas on how to expand awareness of the rugby team through influencer outreach. Skip Perham, who runs the Sawyer Business School’s Sports Management Program and brought the Free Jacks client to Suffolk in the Hub, suggests outreach to personalities from a number of traditional Boston broadcast media outlets, including 98.5 The Sports Hub. It gets quiet on the student side of the conference table. Ring interrupts the silence. “How many of you listen to The Sports Hub?” she asks. Crickets. Asked what media they do consume, the students say typically TikTok and Instagram. Then, Colby White, a senior global business and marketing major, mentions Barstool Boston. “OK, I didn’t know there was a Barstool Boston,” Perham admits. As the conversation and idea pitching continue, Perham, who like Ring is an experienced PR and marketing professional, is suddenly taking a deep dive on his smart phone. Five minutes later, he interrupts the conversation: “Can we go back to Barstool Boston?” Perham holds up the Barstool Boston Instagram profile on his phone. “There are all kinds of graphics on here, right?” he asks. “There’s the final score of the Boston Celtics game. So the question becomes, Who created that? Who’s feeding them this? Can we just pump Barstool Boston with Free Jacks content? Are they going to just run whatever we send them?” The group jumps on the idea. It’s a powerful combination of fresh ideas colliding with experienced mentoring to create something greater.

Case Study: Chinatown Tours

Boston Chinatown Tours is a small company that offers visitors guided tours exploring Chinatown’s culture, history, and food. Suffolk in the Hub students have developed strategic recommendations to build brand awareness and increase tour bookings.

Imani Chanka, a junior global business and marketing major, is Suffolk in the Hub’s culture and community director. Through the agency, she launched a podcast called “Let’s Go Clubbin’,” where she sits down with the presidents of various Suffolk student clubs to talk about their organizations. “There are so many different stories on Suffolk’s campus, so many different people,” she says. In addition to the external clients, Suffolk in the Hub is also working internally to promote Suffolk organizations. The agency has developed campaigns for Suffolk Votes, a University organization that helps students register to vote and navigate the voting process. Hub students are building a content marketing strategy—including blogs, a podcast, and videos—for the Sawyer Business School Artificial Intelligence Leadership Collaborative (SAIL), which is integrating AI into business education, research, and practice. The Hub is also running campaigns for the University’s Day of Giving effort, with a focus on student athletes. Sawyer Business School Dean Amy Zeng says Suffolk in the Hub offers not only “an exemplary approach” to immersive learning, but also “a meaningful way for students to make a societal impact.” Both things sit at the core of the school’s education philosophy. “It’s a very effective bridge in connecting communities,” Zeng says. “The students are inspiring their clients to be thoughtful and supportive of community.” Meanwhile, Hub students are also building community within their own agency. Team members had a pizza dinner before Ubering to East Boston to watch the Suffolk men’s hockey team play. They’ve gathered for a Friendsgiving potluck lunch and exchanged candy grams for Valentine’s Day. All of this contributes to a growing sense of community across Suffolk’s campus. Chanka, who came to Suffolk from Pennsylvania as a transfer student, says the community she has found through the agency has made all the difference. “It means so much to me that I feel I don’t even have the words to say it.” Coming in as a transfer student was difficult, Chanka says. “Sometimes it’s hard to find your footing when everyone else is so established in their daily lives and friends.” She says colleagues within the agency, including Isenstadt, acted as guides and mentors for her. “They were so willing and open to helping me. That kind of rubs off on everyone.” Ring says what started as a portfolio and experience booster feels different now. “This is more like a family for them,” she says. “They make friends with each other. It’s no longer just, ‘I need this for my résumé.’” Asked what she wants the students to take away from their Suffolk in the Hub experiences, Ring doesn’t miss a beat: “I want them to get jobs.” She then pauses in thought for a few seconds, before adding: “And then I want them to invest in others the way I’ve invested in them. I want them to go on and build other people up and invest their time in helping other people learn.”

Ring says her top goal for her students (including Ava Costa, above) is to “get jobs. And then I want them to invest in others the way that I’ve invested in them.”

Case Study: Free Jacks Rugby

Kim Ring uses a “mentor up” model that teams grad students who have professional experience with undergraduates. In a recent agency team pitch session on behalf of the Free Jacks rugby team, Suffolk in the Hub students and advisors tossed around ideas on how to expand the rugby team’s reach through influencer marketing.

Toward the end of the all-agency meeting, a visitor asks the students what it’s like to work with Kim Ring. That opens the floodgates. One by one, they stand and speak to the impact Ring and Suffolk in the Hub have had on their lives. “Kim is quite simply the reason that we’re here,” Isenstadt says. “Like, I honestly don’t know where I would be ...” Quietly, Ring is starting to cry. “Don’t do that,” Isenstadt warns. “Don’t do that, because I’ll do it too.” Isenstadt continues: “I wouldn’t have a passion. I wouldn’t have what could become a job. I wouldn’t have all these awesome friends. Every time we have a monthly meeting, I feel like I’m going to a family reunion.” Standing in the back, Thomas Dempsey, a captain of the Suffolk men’s hockey team, echoes that thought. “Our falls and winters are very, very busy, and we don’t have that much time for extracurricular stuff,” he says. “Suffolk in the Hub has been a great opportunity to do something other than hockey. We’ve kind of become part of this big ol’ family. They come to our hockey games to support us. I attended my first-ever Friendsgiving. Professor Ring wrote me a recommendation letter. I didn’t even ask her for one. She’s been our biggest fan.” Ava Costa, a senior, is fighting back her own tears. “I think she put a lot of confidence into me before I had it on my own,” she says. Indu Arya, a marketing graduate student, says, “I see her waking up at like 3 in the morning and working. And I think, ‘If she can do it, then someday ...’” And then Arya turns to Ring and says to her directly: “I want to be like you. I want to run an agency. I want to run a startup and just be on my toes all the time.” “You’re gonna do it,” Ring tells her, through tears. “You don’t want to do it. You’re going to do it.”

Jillian Isenstadt says Suffolk in the Hub has given her a newfound passion, new friends and career opportunities.