Research

“Make your research about the world, not the literature.” - Richard Thaler

1. Workforce Configuration in Charity Settings: A Forward-looking Approach

Summary: Volunteering is a significant sector, with American volunteers contributing 6.9 billion hours in 2017, valued at $170 billion. Beyond their time, volunteers also contribute financially. This study presents a distributionally robust optimization model that accounts for volunteer heterogeneity, balances staffing costs, and links time and monetary donations. Our findings challenge the traditional separation of donor and volunteer management and suggest that, using data from SVdP, charities can improve performance by up to 35%.

Download the Decision Support Tool here

Decision Tree Model for Implementation

Violin Chart for Optimality Gap Comparison

2. Does Volunteering Crowd Out Donations? Evidence from Online Experiments

Summary: Does volunteering crowd out or crowd in donations? We conducted two experiments where participants engaged in a virtual volunteering task, creating "Sweet Dreams" cards for homeless shelter guests, followed by an opportunity to donate to a charity. Our findings suggest that (i) volunteer programs not only expand a charity's labor pool but can also boost donations; (ii) charities should develop virtual volunteering initiatives to engage more volunteers and increase resources; and (iii) to maximize donations, charities should design light volunteer tasks that promote participant autonomy.

Follow-up: The charity plans to scale its "sweet dreams card" program and other virtual volunteering tasks. For example, watch the video of their recent heat-relief shelter.

Sweet Dream Card in Shelter

Sweet Dream Card from Experiment

3. Improving the Quality of In-Kind Donations: A Field Experiment

Summary: In-kind donations support a charity's triple bottom line—generating revenue, enhancing social welfare, and reducing environmental waste. However, inappropriate donations add costs for sorting, processing, or disposal. Reducing these undesirable contributions is challenging due to charities' delicate relationships with donors. In a natural field experiment, we tested two behavioral interventions: information disclosure and social norms. Our results show that social norm interventions significantly improved the quality of in-kind donations, while the commonly used information disclosure method was ineffective.

Media Coverage: The Conversation

In-kind Donations have persistent quality issue

In-kind Donation Pickup

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