We got an interesting email the other day from our friend Jim Jansen, assistant professor at the College of Information Science and Technology at Penn State. If you haven't heard of Jim yet or aren't familiar with his research in search marketing and searcher behavior, read our recent interview with him here: Jim Jansen on Click Behavior and SERP integration [6].

Jim told me about a really cool project he and his students are doing in his PPC advertising course (BTW, how cool is a class on PPC advertising?). He and 55 of his technology and advertising students at Penn State are creating keyword advertising campaigns for eleven non-profit organizations. Apparently, the students will be implementing paid search campaigns for these eleven non-profits, as well as doing some SEO work and optimizing landing pages for their websites.

Jim says that he's really excited about this project because doing work this sort of work really helps students realize the challenges that not-for-profits face with limited resources, marketing, and technology. The PPC advertising project was funded by a $30,000 grant from Google.

What's very cool too is that Jim said he and his students used The FREE Keyword Tool [7] to conduct keyword research for the paid search campaigns. 

You can read more about this project and see the list of 11 non-profits Jim and his class are working with over at Jim Jansen's Web Search Blog [8]. You can also follow Jim on Twitter: @JimJansen [9].