Want a visit behind the scenes at a Formula One racing team, to fly to the New York fashion week and watch a catwalk show, or take tea on the terrace at the Houses of Parliament with Vince Cable, MP? These were some of the trips of a lifetime organised by students at Cass Business School, who raised £9,000 for Oxfam when the charity recently auctioned these prizes on eBay. Oxfam Experiences, a fundraising spin-off, was launched two years ago to tap the growing demand for adventure typified by the website Red Letter Days. Instead of selling hot air ballooning and bungee jumping, Oxfam decided to challenge business schools and blue chip companies to show their entrepreneurial skills.

Apart from Cass, Oxfam Experiences has worked, or is working with, London Business School, Warwick, Tanaka, and Cranfield and, on the corporate front, with PricewaterhouseCoopers, Vodafone, IBM, T-Mobile, Shell and Bodyshop. According to Oxfam, the Cass team raised the most money of any business school.

Chris Storey, director of the Cass full-time MBA, decided the offer to fundraise was too good to miss. Storey was already teaching creativity as part of the marketing module. Getting Oxfam Experiences on board would provide students with a real life challenge while creating a tangible product that Oxfam could auction to the highest bidder. Two classes of about 30 students each took part.

Storey invited the Oxfam Experiences team to Cass to run two one-day workshops in the first week of the MBA programme. The classes reconvened a week later to allow students time to deliver experiences. Storey says: “We saw problem solving as part of the students’ development. It fits with leadership, team working and presentation skills. In a way, the business learning is a side effect.”

Mike Kelly, a former chief executive and Oxfam volunteer, and Fiona Kelbrick, of Oxfam Experiences, arrived at Cass prepared to motivate.

The students were divided into teams of five or six people. Kelly says: “We told them it was a bit like Sir Alan Sugar’s The Apprentice. Each team selects a leader, brainstorms and then goes through a process of selecting the best ideas, but they have not only got to be imaginative, they have to have the potential to raise a lot of money.” Any student with a sales or marketing background is at an advantage as delivering on a suggested experience will mean cold calling and attempting to persuade the key decision-makers within an organisation.

Kelbrick was impressed by the students’ enthusiasm. She says: “The Cass students were very good at divergent thinking and were really entrepreneurial. Students were prepared to use their personal networks in order to get results. I also think they were incredibly motivated. There was a real energy to the groups.” Chris Storey prepared the class with basic techniques such as brain storming and root cause analysis, that is basically redefining the problem and then drilling down to find the best solution.

Rupert Watkins, a student, used his connection with the exclusive St James’s wine merchant Berry Bros & Rudd to come up with an unusual experience – being weighed on the shop’s famous 18th-century coffee scales. Watkins says: “In the 18th century the shop sold coffee and if you were a regular they would weigh you on the giant coffee scales and record your weight in a hand-written ledger.”

Famous characters such as Beau Brummel and the Prince Regent once tipped the scales. But these days very few people get to be weighed. Says Watkins: “It’s a real privilege. You could have your weight recorded on the same page as Winston Churchill.”

Students and Oxfam hit on a winning formula

The Oxfam Experiences project was Dinesh Sathianathan’s first taste of the Cass Business School’s full-time MBA.

He says: “It was in our first week of the course, there was no hierarchy and we had to learn to work together.” An engineering graduate with seven years’ experience as a project manager, Sathianathan, below, had just come from a job as a senior manager for Altran. His suggested experience was a day behind the scenes visiting the Honda Formula One works at Brackley.

“I had just set up a technical partnership between the Oxford University’s engineering department, Honda and Altran. I was able to meet the Honda chief designer, discuss the idea with him, secured his agreement and by the end of the week we had sign-off from Honda’s PR department.”

Sold at auction, it raised £2,000 for Oxfam. Not bad for a week’s work.

Sathianathan was most impressed by a trip to New York. He explains: “One of the women in the team had worked in the fashion industry and arranged a trip to New York fashion week. She ended up negotiating free hotel room and complimentary flight tickets. It was a real learning experience to watch her in action.”

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