Westview Beta Marketing Team Places 1st at National Convention
Quiz Bowl brings home #6 and Speech Team brings home #10 at convention
The Westview Beta Marketing and Communications Team took home first place for their presentation at the National Beta Convention in Savannah Georgia last weekend to the delights of students, sponsors and family members.
12 beta members, two sponsors and family members traveled to Savannah after placing 5th in the state championship in November 2023.
Five teams from 18 states across the nation participated in the competition with a total of approximately 90 teams participating and out of 90, Westview Beta placed first. This was also the first year that a marketing and communications team from Westview participated.
Sponsor, Kim Simmons, said that after placing fifth at State in November, the team had worked relentlessly to make their final product the best that it could be.
“This is a remarkable group of kids who worked very hard to recognize that working as a team is not always easy. They had to take each other’s ideas into consideration to be able to come up with a final product and they did a fantastic job of putting aside individual wants and looking at it from a team perspective,” Simmons said.
Every fall there is a state beta convention that involves all the teams in Tennessee that choose to participate in a variety of categories.
For the first time ever, Westview Beta chose marketing as one of their categories. Their prompt was to look at their community and some events and see if they could rearrange and re-market that event to target a youth demographic. The team chose the Soybean Festival as their event and met with Community Development Director, Brad Thompson and Marketing Director, Camille Hall Noe from the City of Martin for tips and pointers for their project. The city provided the team with t-shirts to represent Martin Soybean during their presentation.
“Westview Beta reached out to us to advise them regarding their marketing presentation for the Tennessee Soybean Festival. We were happy to make the time for a brainstorming session and to offer a few pointers. Our marketing team at City Hall has won numerous awards, and we were happy to be able to share some of our best practices and creative thoughts with the Westview Beta Marketing team. I am so proud of them for representing Martin and the Tennessee Soybean Festival so well at the national level. They are certainly a very talented group of individuals, and I look forward to their continued involvement with the community,” Thompson said.
“I had so much fun working with the Westview Beta marketing team! When I received the call that they had won at nationals, I was so excited for them. They really put in the work on this effort and it paid off—First Place Marketing Team at Beta Nationals! I knew when they practiced presenting their final presentation to us that there was something special about this group. I am glad the judges saw that as well,” Noe stated.
Teams have to place in the top five at the state competition to move forward into the national competition and after placing 5th at the state competition, the team had the past 7 months to take that presentation and polish it. With only two minutes allotted to present their idea, the team had to work very hard to get all of the information presented. The team even had goody bags with products that contained soy in them.
“They spent a lot of time practicing their roles, narrowing their presentation down and figuring out who would speak and preparing and finalizing everything. It really truly was a group effort of all of them taking individual parts and putting it together into a cohesive unit,” Simmons stated.
The City of Martin once again provided t-shirts for the team for their presentation at Nationals and also printed the teams brochures which the team designed themselves and the team produced a Canva banner which the city also printed for them and allowed the team to use their banner stand at the convention. The city also listened to the teams presentation before they left for nationals for a bit of last-minute feedback and polishing.
“I am so proud of the Westview Beta marketing team! It is no surprise to me that our staff at City Hall stepped up to advise these young folks. We have a talented team at Martin City Hall, and we are always happy to be of service wherever possible,” Martin Mayor Randy Brundige stated.
After the team gave their presentation, they are notified on the app whether they placed 1-5, 6-10 and so on, but the app does not tell teams what they placed until those teams are called out by the judges with only 1 member from each team stepping forward.
The team knew they had placed in the top five, but as they waited for second place to be called and realized they had won first, there was thunderous applause, laughter and tears, Simmons said.
“They were so excited and proud-we all were. Westview Beta has made Martin proud. It was an exciting experience for these kids to go through and create a product as good as theirs was,” Simmons said.
The Beta Quiz bowl also placed 6th- and Beta Speech took home 10th during the national competition.
