Cause Marketing

There he is at your fancy gala; rich, successful, and bored out of his mind. He’s got an MBA from an Ivy League school, an undergrad in economics and a wife… who studied art history… and who drags him kicking and screaming to your events. He’s worth a mint, but the most you may ever get from him is the price of the gala’s tickets. Is it even possible to get this Philistine to change his mind about your cause? The answer has as much to do with how people learn and what kind of ideas they are exposed to as it does how much money they have to give. (Read more about the learning side of this equation on my blog on informal learning called The Learner's Guild .) A yet-to-be published study by Professor Raymond Fisman from Columbia Business School… along with Shachar Kariv of UC Berkeley and Daniel Markovitz of the Yale Law School… suggests that even mature students can change their minds when presented with powerful ideas. In this study Fisman and his co-authors Shachar Kariv and D...

Early this month Forbes ran a guest column by Columbia Business School Professor Raymond Fisman that is strangely relatable to both cause-related marketing and informal learning, the topics of my two blogs. The Forbes headline describes it beautifully; “You Are What You Learn.” I’ve posted on what Fisman’s findings mean to informal learners on my blog on informal learning called The Learner’s Guild . Tomorrow in this space I’ll post on what Fisman’s study might mean to fundraisers and to those of us who practice cause-related marketing. So why the brain in the box on the left? Fisman’s study supports two seemingly diametrically-opposed conclusions. The first is that your training determines who you are. The second is that you can change all that. Stay tuned...