It’s the season of giving, so you’ve probably gotten lots of appeals from charitable organizations hoping for that year-end donation—or perhaps you’re the one trying to raise funds for a cause you care about. If so, you know that getting people to open their hearts (and wallets) is no small feat.

This week, we’ll share a few lessons from Kellogg faculty that can help you inspire more generosity in others and understand your own charitable impulses. We’ll also bring you some highlights from a roundtable conversation with marketing experts on how the industry is adapting to a changing world.

The psychology of charitable giving

Have you ever made a donation and been prompted to share the news of your beneficence on social media? For many of us, the proposition feels a little distasteful—even though we know charities really benefit from the word-of-mouth marketing.

Fortunately, Ike Silver, an assistant professor of marketing at Kellogg, has identified a way around this conundrum. By reframing the request to share as a way to promote the cause, Silver’s research shows, charitable organizations can overcome the “ick” factor and get more donors to spread the word.

In one experiment with the classroom-donation platform DonorsChoose, Silver and his coauthor tested what would happen if, in lieu of the usual “share” message, the donors saw this instead: “Your donation can start a chain reaction, but only if you tell others about the cause. Share this classroom with family and friends.”

The research team found that donors who saw the new messaging were five percent more likely to click on a social-media icon. Critically for schools, the authors also found that because it increased sharing, the new message prompted greater donor recruitment and raised more money overall.

So don’t feel shy about speaking out when you donate. In fact, Silver will be right there with you. “As I’ve studied this more and more, I feel more willing to go out on a limb for charities I care about,” he says.

Buy some, give some

Another way to support causes you care about is to shop with a company that promises to make a donation on your behalf with each purchase.

This practice, called giving-by-proxy, has grown in popularity—and even expanded outside of the retail context, with some companies dangling the promise of a philanthropic gift as an incentive for strong employee performance.

And it turns out that giving-by-proxy engenders more giving. A 2023 study by Maryam Kouchaki, a professor of management and organizations at Kellogg, found that people are more prosocial following a giving-by-proxy experience. “There’s a spillover effect,” she says.

Kouchaki and her coauthors uncovered this effect in several experiments, including one using Amazon’s now-defunct AmazonSmile program. Under this program, customers shopped at an identical-looking website, AmazonSmile.com, where purchases benefited a charity of their choice.

The researchers gave participants an Amazon gift card and asked them to choose from one of six items to purchase, either via AmazonSmile or Amazon’s traditional platform. Then, participants were told they would be entered into a raffle to win $50. Participants were significantly more likely to donate the potential raffle winnings to charity if they’d shopped on AmazonSmile versus the traditional platform.

The message is clear: giving-by-proxy puts us in the mood to give more.

Want to learn more about the science of do-gooding? You can read more in Kellogg Insight.

Priorities for today’s marketing leaders

The pandemic ushered in seismic economic, technological, and social changes in the ways business is conducted—and marketing leaders are at the forefront of a lot of these changes.

The 2023 Kellogg Marketing Leadership Summit, co-hosted by Kellogg, McKinsey & Company, and Egon Zehnder, brought marketing leaders together in conversations focused on how they can build resilience for companies, teams, and themselves in the face of radical industry shifts. Three main topics emerged.

1. Marketing leaders continue to wrestle with the influx of data that is available to their teams—and the changing skillset required to harness it. “A lot of companies are drowning in data, which has been around for a while. The best marketing leaders are staying focused on figuring out where there is the most value, and what is the job to be done,” says Jeff Jacobs, a partner at McKinsey & Company.

2. Marketing talent values flexibility more than ever before—so marketing leaders are having to decide whether and how to accommodate this while still maintaining a healthy company culture. “I hosted a panel of young people at an event recently and asked: How many of you would leave your company if you had to be in the office five days a week?,” says Jim Stengel, a senior fellow and adjunct professor of marketing at Kellogg. “Nearly all of them said they would leave.”

3. Building more-inclusive organizations continues to be a priority for marketing leaders—but with so many other priorities, it’s not clear whether the emphasis on DEI will continue. “To sustain change, the pressure’s going to have to continue to come from both leaders and newer team members, but ultimately the tone of inclusivity has to be set at a leadership level,” says Martha Williams, a consultant at Egon Zehnder.

You can read more about the future of marketing in Kellogg Insight.