Shikha Safaya

PhD Candidate | Operations Management | Scheller College of Business

Suite 4322 | Scheller College of Business | Georgia Institute of Technology

800 West Peachtree St NW, Atlanta, GA – 30308 | Email: shikha.safaya@scheller.gatech.edu

Area: Operations Management

Committee Members: Dr. Basak Kalkanci (Co-Chair), Dr. Ravi Subramanian (Co-Chair), Dr. Manpreet Hora, Dr. Alfonso Pedraza-Martinez (University of Notre Dame)

Title: Strategies for Matching Volunteer Effort and Beneficiary Needs in Non-Profit Organizations

Dissertation Overview:

Non-Profit Organizations (NPOs) play a crucial role in improving society’s well-being by filling in gaps where government resources or policies fall short. NPOs predominantly rely on volunteers to deliver essential services such as food and shelter to people in need, together adding substantial socioeconomic value. Effective management of volunteers is intricate and NPOs often encounter challenges such as volunteer retention in the absence of monetary incentives, lack of control over schedules, and unreliability of participation. In this dissertation, I address some of these challenges and propose strategies that NPOs can use to enhance volunteer engagement and beneficiary welfare. I collaborate with Meals on Wheels Atlanta (MOWA), an organization that prepares nutritious meals according to the dietary requirements of its beneficiaries (seniors) who are financially disadvantaged, food insecure, have limited mobility, and are often socially isolated. MOWA relies on volunteers for food delivery and interpersonal interactions to ensure the overall well-being of the seniors it serves.

In the first chapter, I aim to understand how different factors related to MOWA’s service design contribute to the satisfaction of volunteers and seniors. I develop comprehensive frameworks to more generally conceptualize and measure volunteer and beneficiary satisfaction in NPOs. Through rich data that I collected from surveys I administered to MOWA’s volunteers and seniors, I observed heterogeneity in service preferences – some volunteers and seniors primarily emphasize timely meal delivery, while others also value interpersonal interaction.

Leveraging this insight, I develop a game-theoretic model in my second chapter whereby I explore the tradeoff between incorporating volunteer preferences in task assignments versus pooling volunteers to alleviate mismatch between supply and demand. In doing so, I endogenize volunteers’ decisions to participate based on their expected utilities from serving beneficiaries and from their outside options. I analytically derive the conditions under which a particular policy may be preferred by the NPO and volunteers. I observe that the policy preference for the NPO depends on the overall demand to be covered and the volunteers’ utility gap between their preferred and non-preferred tasks. Consequently, I suggest levers that can be utilized by NPOs to better align the incentives of the stakeholders. My findings offer prescriptive insights for NPOs to improve beneficiary service and volunteer engagement.

Recognizing the operational uncertainty that NPOs face in terms of volunteer participation, I propose to study volunteer participation decisions and analyze the impact of using non-monetary levers such as task commitment for volunteers to help mitigate the uncertainty for NPOs and improve volunteer engagement and retention. For this third chapter, I plan on using laboratory experiments to test the willingness of volunteers to show up on repeated occasions by nudging them to truthfully reveal their decisions, and also measure their satisfaction, engagement and effort.