Volunteers are one of the greatest assets of nonprofits. They enable organizations to extend their reach despite budget constraints. Managing a blended workforce of volunteers, paid part-time and full-time staff presents a unique challenge, fraught with extreme variability, especially when volunteer availability fluctuates unpredictably and budget constraints limit hiring.
How can a nonprofit best assess how many paid staff to hire in times of volunteer sufficiency and scarcity? How can they distribute tasks and time in such extreme variability to maintain reliable services? At present there has been no digital solution to optimize nonprofits’ staff management for agility, intelligence and flexibility in deploying their manpower.
That’s the dilemma that Purdue’s William Haskell, Mitch Daniels School of Business assistant professor of management, Gemma Berenguer (Universidad Carlos II de Madrid) and Lei Li (formerly at Purdue, now at Hong Kong Polytechnic University) tackled in their recent study.
The co-authors of “Managing Volunteers and Paid Workers in a Nonprofit Operation,” forthcoming in Management Science, found that no computer algorithm can quickly or directly solve staffing challenges over many time periods in general, but there are two rules that bring organizations closer to optimal staffing.
“We call these dynamic programming problems,” says Haskell. “When you make decisions like this there’s some randomness going on, so they are fundamentally unsolvable on a computer because you need to be able to store and do calculations for every possible state of the system, and the number of states grows quickly. If it gets just a little bit more complex, the overall complexity goes up exponentially.”
A complex problem: equations to allocate staff efficiently
The complexity can be a headache for volunteer coordinators and staff managers. The two rules proposed in this study — a prioritization assignment policy and a hire-up-to policy for part-timers — are equations that come as close as possible to helping nonprofits optimize their volunteers and staff both in times of scarcity, like holidays and busy summer months, and when staff is sufficient. The prioritization assignment policy identifies conditions for the staff coordinator to assign part-time or full-time staff as much as possible before switching to volunteers since volunteers have limited availability, impacting mission-critical tasks. The hire-up-to policy is based on an equation that determines how much part-time staff to hire.
Each of these equations must take into account the training investment that the nonprofit offers each level of staff and the expectations of the people in their workforce. Volunteers may feel ill-equipped for tasks often handled by paid staff, and part-time and full-time staff have varying expectations about task assignments.
Both rules depend on data gathered from nonprofits - past interactions with volunteers, level and capacity of services provided, part-time staff turnover, budget constraints and variability of the volunteer pool. Plugging that data into the equations allows consultants to help organizations forecast how many people they’ll be able to hire in volunteer shortfalls or how much they can lean on volunteers in times of sufficiency.
The use case: how one nonprofit manages 650 volunteers
Consider Noble of Indiana, a nonprofit the authors included in their study. Noble expands opportunities and enhances quality of life for people with disabilities. To do so, it manages 650 volunteers in addition to their paid staff. The magnitude of their challenge is proportional to the services they offer and their budget. They need highly-trained direct support professionals for most of their services but work with volunteers for fundraising events, day camps, clerical assistance, groundskeeping, therapeutic art, activities, and job support for their clients. In seasons of volunteer scarcity, they need to hire part-time staff, balancing staff sufficiency with budget constraints.
Nonprofits typically cannot pay staff as competitively as a for-profit organization can, which creates turnover for positions that require more training than volunteers receive. Such an organization may recruit highly skilled volunteers, but those workers are unlikely to volunteer the 10 to 30 hours a week that a part-time person would work. In an extensive, thriving nonprofit like Noble, the budget is a unique constraint.
“This is not a replacement for the on-the-ground experience of long-term volunteer coordinators who work in these spaces.” — William Haskell, supply chain and operations management assistant professor, Mitch Daniels School of Business
Haskell and fellow researchers developed a model that took into account volunteer turnover and budget constraints and variability, among other factors, to provide more clarity for staff managers.
“The fact that there is a budget at all is another distinguishing feature of the nonprofit, not just that they have this high volunteer turnover rate — but it’s not a money-making operation. People are not throwing money at them,” notes Haskell.
The outcome: confidence with decision support
The equations for nonprofits are far more complex with variables such as those. Decision-making can be more of a headache, which is why Haskell and his colleagues tackled this challenge.
The researchers’ two rules would be a form of “decision support,” as Haskell calls them, for how many part-time people to hire and where to best plug volunteers into the organization’s mission and reach. Because the researchers’ hire-up-to policy and prioritization assignment policy are equations dependent on the unique data provided by organizations, they are “idealizations and abstractions of what is actually happening.”
“This is not a replacement for the on-the-ground experience of long-term volunteer coordinators who work in these spaces,” says Haskell. But they can lighten the load and affirm difficult decisions.
