Marketing Professor Dr. Gopala Ganesh was honored with this year’s UNT Foundation Community Engagement Award.

Recognizing his vast efforts to integrate exemplary community engagement into his curriculum (and beyond), Ganesh was surprised in late January by Vice Provost for Faculty Success Holly Hutchins and a large check. He was the only awardee of this year’s UNT Foundation Community Engagement Award, one of the university’s most respected distinctions.

"It was a very happy experience for me and a great honor to be recognized in front of my students," said Ganesh.

An honor that many would agree is well deserved.

Since joining the university in 1983, Ganesh has been developing creative ways to facilitate growth for both his students and the greater community.

In 2006, he became one of the first professors in the nation to teach his advanced marketing research analytics course entirely online, driving him to innovate ways to better engage his class, virtually.

“This was a daunting task because of the significant advanced statistical analysis content that many students find challenging even in a face-to-face format,” explained Ganesh. “I had the great opportunity to learn new ways of presenting course content and assessments online and it was an immense learning experience to get it done.”
 
One way in which Ganesh found success was bringing in real-world data from community partners for students to learn from.
 
“I have always opted to serve, at negligible cost, public organization clients that typically do not have the budget to hire a marketing research consultant. Many of these past clients have been units of UNT Denton,” said Ganesh.
 
In addition to connecting his students with the community, Ganesh himself has volunteered his personal time and expertise to several neighboring entities.
“Over the years, I have also voluntarily approached public organizations and offered them their help in conducting other customer satisfaction surveys. These have nothing to do with my classes and the only objective is to help these clients collect valuable input from their large customer bases using scientific survey research techniques and use this feedback in their planning for the future.”