Friday, July 11, from 9:30 am to 11:00 am Eastern Time in Room 201, Scheller College of Business.

You are also welcome to join remotely via Zoom: https://gatech.zoom.us/j/96030787668.

An overview is included below, and copies of the dissertation are available upon request. 

Regards

Shikha

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 | https://www.shikhasafaya.com/

Area: Operations Management

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

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

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 use game theory and data analytics to investigate 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.

Essay 1: Impact of Service Operations on Client-Volunteer Relationships and Satisfaction in a Non-Profit Organization: The Case of MOWA

Service quality is an important operational performance dimension that is only recently receiving attention in NPO research. Understanding how different factors related to service design influence beneficiary (client) and volunteer satisfaction is crucial for NPOs to sustain engagement and high service quality. In this essay, after extensive reviews of the literature on NPO service design, service provider and recipient interaction, and volunteer efforts, I develop a comprehensive conceptual framework of client and volunteer satisfaction, including constructs such as Client Perceived Wellbeing, Interaction Quality, Volunteer Motivation, and Participation Efficacy. I conduct surveys of more than 100 volunteers and beneficiaries, using Qualtrics for the volunteers and mailed paper surveys for the seniors. Overall, despite beneficiary and volunteer satisfaction from MOWA’s service, I find important gaps in engagement of volunteers and social isolation among seniors. A contributing factor is the difference in service preferences: Some seniors and volunteers cared primarily about receiving or delivering meals on time, while others also valued interpersonal interactions. This distinction has significant operational implications for NPOs such as MOWA, suggesting the opportunity for offering differentiated services (such as offering meal delivery with or without interpersonal interactions) to meet diverse stakeholder requirements more effectively.

Essay 2: Mapping the Volunteer Life Cycle: A Data-Driven Perspective

NPOs rely heavily on a “charitable” workforce – volunteers who contribute their time and effort without monetary compensation. Since volunteers as service providers are crucial resources for the NPO, it is important to understand their path within the organization. In this essay, I develop a conceptual framework of the Volunteer Life Cycle and propose measures to quantify various aspects of the volunteer experience, from signing up to their decisions to continue volunteering. Using MOWA’s volunteering data from 2018 to 2024, I examine patterns of continued participation, route adoption, and transitions from group-based to individual volunteering. My findings offer insights into volunteer participation dynamics and inform the design of volunteer management strategies.

Essay 3: Allocating Volunteers to Beneficiaries in a Non-Profit Organization

Incorporating volunteer preferences in task assignment can be expected to increase volunteer satisfaction, retention, and service quality provided to beneficiaries. In this essay, I develop an analytical model, leveraging a key insight from essay 1 related to heterogenous service preferences not previously elicited by MOWA. I compare two policies of allocating volunteers to beneficiaries in an NPO: a Pooled policy, which groups volunteers together without knowledge of their underlying preferences (to capture the status quo); and a Preference-based policy, which incorporates known volunteer preferences during allocation (as a potential improvement over the status quo). The choice between these two policies involves a tradeoff between incorporating volunteer preferences during allocation to beneficiaries for increasing volunteer utility and motivating participation, and pooling all volunteers to alleviate supply-demand mismatch. Through a rational expectations equilibrium model, I endogenize the volunteers’ participation decisions based on their expected utilities from serving beneficiaries and from their outside options. I find that the Pooled policy results in a higher average utility for the volunteer pool when demand is low and the “mismatch” utility is high (due to the dominant utilization effect); but the Preference-based policy results in a higher average utility otherwise (due to the dominant utility effect). For the NPO, the policy choice is driven by their cost to fulfill demand left unserved by the volunteers, the benefit reduction faced by beneficiaries in case of a mismatched volunteer allocation, and volunteer participation as affected by the mismatch utility. I prescribe managerial levers for NPOs to align the incentives of all stakeholders.