SERVSIG is proud to announce Rebekah Russell-Bennett as the inaugural Social Impact Officer of the SERVSIG board. The Social Impact Officer is a new role in recognition of the increasing need for service scholars to use research to improve the lives of people and the planet. The Social Impact Officer will help SERVSIG members create social impact with their research by providing guidance, resources, and support. We invited Rebekah to introduce herself so you get to know her better.
I was delighted when provided with the opportunity to develop the job description for the Social Impact Officer role on the SERVSIG board. I know many of the members of SERVSIG and have attended 10 of the 13 SERVSIG conferences, starting with Sydney 2001 when I was a doctoral student. I met Ray Fisk very early and marveled at how such an esteemed member of my thesis reference list could be so friendly and welcoming, this made me want to get to know SERVSIG better. So, almost twenty years after that first fateful meeting, it was my great honor to co-chair the 2020 SERVSIG with Prof. Dominique Greer, the first virtual SERVSIG conference (thanks, COVID!). So SERVSIG has been my community for all my academic life, and so I feel a strong emotional bond.
My journey to academia was not a straight line. In fact, the first-year professors in my psychology degree would be gobsmacked to see that I went all the way with my studies. I finished 12 years of school in 10 years across five different schools in two different countries, which meant I was always the youngest in every activity by several years and thus a social misfit. I didn’t have many friends and so I would spend a lot of time in the library reading Asterix comics in French (to improve my French) or the Encyclopedia Brittanica (just because). My love of reading books was immense, and I enjoyed nothing more than being tucked into a corner at home, reading my way through Middle Earth (I was always an elf) or an 18th Century romance between some Duke and a commoner (I was the commoner in the story ????). So, it was probably already determined that I would have a career that involved books and reading. My family always had strong female role models whom I could draw inspiration from; my mum was a pioneer in the Australian financial services industry, my grandma was the youngest person to graduate from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music at the time, and my Nanna ran the drama section for a national Bible school. My dad was also my partner in crime, and my favorite marketing memory is when we both convinced my mum to get her company to advertise on toilet paper (the sales pitch was just so darn good, and we were excited to try it). It didn’t work, but I still have the toilet rolls with Mum’s company’s ad on it, so #winning.
After starting five degrees in the social sciences at five different universities and finishing three, I made it to the University of Queensland as an associate lecturer in marketing, and the rest is history. I worked as a marketing manager during my business degrees and Ph.D. (my parents at this point had made me get a real job and possibly given up on me ever finishing), got married, and had two daughters, Brittany and Charlotte at either end of my Ph.D. (book-ends), got divorced and was living happily ever after in my dream career. As a result of all this activity, I learned the value of efficiency and that work/life balance didn’t exist. During those formative academic years, I learned that you have to network and learn from the experiences of others to fit everything in. I learned that nothing needs to be perfect; it just has to be good enough – good enough to get a revision, good enough to be invited to the next grant round, and good enough to get the promotion. Good enough doesn’t mean settling. Good enough means throwing everything you have at something without sacrificing all the other things that matter – fun, integrity, dreams, and time with the people you care about. Those who know me well know that I work really hard and that I like introducing people to each other and seeing what happens. I love a good dance at a SERVSIG conference, especially to an ABBA song. I’m always up for travel to some exciting location to meet interesting researchers, and I adore my wonderful husband Greg, whom many SERVSIGgers have met over the years. Indeed, I got engaged to him on the SERVSIG Thessaloniki 2014 conference trip (thanks, Rodoula).
My research area is a blend of Transformative Service Research and Social Marketing. I have always been attracted to the practical side of marketing and using research for good – it is the social marketing background that has taught me how to work with government, non-profits, and commercial organizers to design and implement services and programs that make social impact. I have partnered with more than 45 organizations and generated $20m+ in external funding to develop gamified apps to help people save money on their energy bill, improve services to increase blood donations, identify service delivery issues that reduce participation in cancer screening and develop digital solutions to reduce homelessness for mature women. Importantly, I work with people from other disciplines as solving the world’s problems takes more than services marketing (who knew, right?). In particular, I love working with my BEST center co-director, Uwe Dulleck, a behavioral economist who knows his classical music.
When designing the job description for the Social Impact Officer role, I thought about all the things I needed to learn to be able to undertake the important social impact work we do at the BEST Centre, where I am co-director. So once I am back in Australia in January 2024 from my sabbatical and holiday in Europe, I have four key tasks to support SERVSIG researchers:
1) identify social issues where service research can offer solutions
2) develop resources for SERVSIG researchers to develop research proposals to generate funding for social impact research
3) provide training and tools to communicate and advocate service research findings for practice and policy, and,
4) co-design guidelines and practices for effective collaborations between service scholars and organizations.
My plan is to achieve these tasks through a three-year roadmap. One of the first activities I aim to undertake is to build a list of all SERVSIG scholars with social impact experience and knowledge. I want to harness this knowledge and codesign resources that can be shared amongst the SERVSIG community.
So if you do any form of service research where you work with organizations to have your research implemented, which results in social impact, please complete this Google form.
I will then contact you to see how we might work together to develop useful resources for showing the world what service research can do to make a better world.
So thanks to Sertan, Kristina, and the board for giving me this opportunity.
PS – remember to fill in the Google form if you do any sort of social impact research.
Professor Rebekah Russell-Bennett
Co-director Centre for Behavioural Economics, Society and Technology (BEST), Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Senior Co-editor Journal of Services Marketing
