The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has a lot of influential friends – but how can it deploy them effectively? Who can legitimize a new treatment in the 'global south'? Who can help governments maintain aid commitments? Who can get Gen Zers to care about a cause? Who has influence?
We undertook a deep academic review to integrate the latest research on social influence and used the DELPHI method to establish a fundamental framework for how influence works across domains. This required blending perspectives from a variety of leading academic specialists on the topic of social influence, such as:
- Jeffrey Alexander, cultural sociologist, Yale
- Amy Cuddy, social psychologist, Harvard
- Eliot Smith, brain sciences, Indiana
deep academic review to integrate the latest research on social influence and build a custom model
DELPHI method to establish a fundamental framework for how influence works across domains from specialists on the topic of social influence
We created an internal language and confidence to focus discussions and decisions on how to select influencers. The work was rolled out into a global toolkit to help raise the influencer selection of both agency and grantee partners.