EURO 2025 Leeds
Abstract Submission

2958. A Model for Donor-Beneficiary Assignment at Nonprofit Organizations with Fairness

Invited abstract in session WB-51: Machine learning approaches in multiobjective decision making, stream Multiobjective and vector optimization.

Wednesday, 10:30-12:00
Room: Parkinson B22

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Ajinkya Tanksale
Newcastle University Business School, Newcastle University
2. Jyotirmoy Dalal
OMDS, University of Sheffield

Abstract

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) play vital role in serving the weaker section of society and ensuring the fulfilment of some basic needs of the needy people. However, most NPOs, typically operating under budgetary, workforce, and various regulatory constraints, face constant challenges arising out of complex interactions among factors like fundraising efforts, inflexible earmarked donation management, and obligations towards maintaining transparency and equity in benefit distribution. To this end, we develop a multi-objective mathematical optimization model to determine an equitable assignment of institutional donations to projects of an NPO. Given a set of donors with limited donation capacities and beneficiaries (projects) with known demand for each period in the planning horizon, the model aims to find the optimal allocation of donors to the projects to minimize the total cost at beneficiaries and maximizing social return on investment for the donors. Our novel ‘flexible earmarking’ approach aims acting as a middle ground between two extremes of the current system, namely, full- and no-earmarking, and exploiting the ‘pooling benefits’. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach with the case of a well-known NPO in India that runs children education and welfare project at pan-India level.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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