An optimization framework to provide volunteers with task selection autonomy and group opportunities

Abstract

Nonprofit Organizations (NPOs) rely on volunteers to support community needs but struggle with making strategic volunteer-to-task assignments to enable volunteer satisfaction, and completion of complex tasks. Creation of volunteer groups and their assignment to NPO tasks can help achieve these goals by providing volunteers with opportunity for networking, collaboration, and peer learning. However, strategically creating ideal assignments is challenging because (i) there are exponentially many ways a set of volunteers can be assigned in groups; and (ii) NPOs tend to have limited and uncertain data concerning volunteers' personal preferences, availabilities, and motivations to participate. To address these challenges, this research contributes by introducing an integer programming framework to offer volunteers a menu of tasks to choose from and then based on volunteers' willingness information, creates ideal homogenous volunteer group assignments. These groups are created such that the group collectively meet a task's skill requirements and groups of volunteers of similar skill and affinity levels are prioritized. We apply the developed methodology to a case study based on a partner NPO that works with remote volunteers from multiple countries to produce online educational content. The menu creation method can improve NPO and volunteer-based performance metrics, where the most improvement is observed when a NPO is faced with very picky volunteers. Presenting volunteers with larger menus of tasks also leads to an improvement in ideal group creations. Implementing the group creation methodology helps obtain a statistically significant increase in ideal group creations but results in a tradeoff of decreased benefits to volunteers and the NPO. Finally, implementing a minimum desired group size does not severely impact most KPIs and would be beneficial for an NPO to implement as it encourages the creation and assignment of volunteer groups to tasks.