Rabbi Case

In this world there are many different types of way that people use to influence one another. Depending on the situation at hand or the different type of person involved there can be a ton of variation. In some situations people can over lap the different type of tactic they use and just apply it to the act at hand. For this project was set out to be a participant observer in the day to day life of some of these influence professionals. I went out into the field as a “under cover” observer seeking to find out how these certain professionals get their work accomplished. I seeked out 3 very different professionals, in order to get the best view possible of these skills. I seeked out a person in the sales field to regular retail customers, a wholesale salesperson in a buying department of a store as well as a rabbi trying to raise money for different religious functions. Each of these people has very different but very similar tactics aswell.

The first person that I observed was the rabbi. For this I went with him around to different locations as well as listened in on several phone calls. This rabbi was the rabbi for the student center a the university at buffalo. One of the biggest things that he is fundraising money for is for Friday night Shabbat dinners for the students. This is when the students are encouraged to come to the Chabad student center at around night fall on Friday nights, for prayer and delicious food made my the rabbis wife. Rabbis job is to get intouch with the parents of the students that attend these dinners and tell them all of the wonderful things that their children participated in. also the rabbi tries to attend different events as well as different gatherings to show people that he is deticatied to the cause. One of the things that the rabbi set up was a social gathering for the parents of the students, that come from long island. For this he set up a date and time that was convienent for a good amount of parents to attend. In this case I observed that the rabbi used the social proof tactic, in order to get the parents to attend. In order to do this he called a lot of parents as well as emailed them notifying them of the event. When he spoke to the parents he spoke a lot about how their kids are so great and all of the diffenet activities nthat they have participated in. after he made the parents very happy about all of the things that their kids are involved in, he mentioned if