Task assignment and retention of volunteers in nonprofit organizations

Abstract

In many nonprofit organizations, service capacity relies on volunteers. Due to a limited volunteer labor pool, high volunteer turn-over rates and limited training resources, nonprofits struggle with how to best train volunteers and utilize them in their missions. Our research focuses on creating a multi-period integer linear program that optimally assigns volunteers and employees to tasks within a nonprofit’s planning horizon. This is challenging because task assignments influence the service operations of the nonprofit, and also influence whether a volunteer will participate again with the nonprofit in future periods. Our math model captures volunteer assignment policy trade-offs. For example, some task assignments provide immediate value to the nonprofit, but can decrease repeat participation of volunteers. We also consider that both the volunteers and the organization have preferences for tasks. Volunteers must be trained by employees before being assigned to tasks and nonprofit employees’ time is a limited resource, which must be allocated among both training volunteers and completing tasks for the nonprofit. The results from our model suggest that the model balances trade-offs between current organizational preferences and future volunteer retention when making task-assignments. Our model is able to identify tasks that are satisfactory to retain volunteers. Our results support that when employees have more time to train volunteers or complete tasks, fewer tasks are left unfulfilled. Furthermore, when the organization assigns tasks to volunteers where the threshold value for returning is low, there are fewer tasks left unfulfilled than when the volunteer preference threshold value is high.

Keywords: volunteers, volunteer task assignment, nonprofit management, multi-period integer program