Dr. Priyank Arora Presents: Serving Distressed Individuals: Balancing Advisory and Service Delivery Efforts in Nonprofits

UMass Amherst Student Chapter of INFORMs is hosting Dr. Priyank Arora's presentation on: Serving Distressed Individuals:  Balancing Advisory and Service Delivery Efforts in Nonprofits

Refreshments: 10:30am
Presentation: 11:00am-12:00pm

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) that support and serve distressed individuals face a complex task because their clients are often unable to articulate their needs. As a result, these NPOs are driven to not only offer a variety of services to fulfil different needs, but also engage in advisory activities to minimize mismatches between the services clients receive and their true needs. Motivated by several NPOs, such as Daya and Georgia Works, we study a service design dilemma for resource-constrained NPOs who need to balance advisory and service delivery efforts to maximize their social impact. We model the NPO’s service-design problem that captures this essential tradeoff: while increasing advisory efforts increases the likelihood of clients receiving the appropriate services (reduces mismatches), it limits the resources available for different service delivery efforts. We derive optimal advisory and service delivery efforts as a function of the state of the NPO (resources and services) and clients’ characteristics (mix and diversity of needs). We characterize conditions under which an NPO should invest more in its advisory effort as compared to service delivery efforts: when the NPO is not severely resource-constrained, when mismatches lead to high loss of impact, or when service offerings are not scalable. We  also identify conditions under which the NPO should specialize on a single service typ e, i.e., not provide “everything for everyone.” Finally, we analyze the effect of  earmarked funding and other asymmetries between services (in scale or loss of impa ct due to mismatches) on the NPO’s optimal service design. We present an illustration  of our analysis in a practical context, and suggest ways that NPOs can implement our findings in designing their services.

Priyank Arora is an Assistant Professor in the department of Operations & Information Management at the Isenberg School of Management. He is primarily interested in advancing understanding of operational decisionmaking within and across organizations in the presence of social and environmental considerations (for instance, UN Sustainable Development goals such as good health, no poverty, and clean water and energy). Priyank’s current research interests span three areas within the field of Operations Management: nonprofit operations, healthcare operations, and sustainability. His teaching interests are in operations/supply chain management concepts and their interrelationships with societal and environmental responsibilities – with a focus on service industry. Priyank earned his Ph.D. in Business Administration at the Scheller College of Business at Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to academic career, he held Senior Software Engineer position at Samsung Electronics.