Date of Award
Spring 2025
Document Type
Open Access Dissertation
Department
Moore School of Business
First Advisor
Luv Sharma
Abstract
The key to improve the living conditions of those who are economically underprivileged is to provide them with food security and employment opportunities. Therefore, in this dissertation, I focus on varies strategies to improve the operational effectiveness of food banks and a social enterprise that provides sheltered employment services to people with disabilities (PWD). Fundraising performance is vital to the survival and sustainability of any non-profit organization. Thus, in the first chapter, “Enhancing Fundraising Productivity Through Revenue Diversification Decisions: Evidence from Food Banks,” I focus on how to strategically diversify fundraising revenue (the number and the type of solicitation methods to use) to improve fundraising productivity for food banks. Another important aspect of food bank operations is responding to disasters. Thus, in the second chapter, titled “Achieving Resilience with Redundancy in Food Bank Operations,” I investigate the role of two redundancy-building strategies in affecting a food bank’s level of resilience in food distribution in the case of a major disruption: building a large partner agency network and empowering partner agencies to pick up food directly from donors. I find that both strategies allow food banks to ramp up food distribution at a larger scale when facing disruptions, despite the corresponding coordination challenges. In addition, there exists conditional complementarity between the two strategies, i.e., empowering agencies in a large network can further help with food distribution ramp up. Both papers utilize actual data sets from 200 food banks that are members of the Feeding America network, the largest hunger-relief charity in the United States. In the third chapter, titled “the Role of Spontaneous vs Flexible Breaks in Affecting the Productivity of Call Center Agents with Disabilities: A Mediation Analysis,” I identify strategies to accommodate call center agents with different severity levels of disability to improve their productivity by configuring the length of idle time between two calls. These easily implementable and low-cost accommodations can promote the employers’ willingness to hire PWD as well as the economic conditions of PWD.
Rights
© 2025, Yingru Han
Recommended Citation
Han, Y.(2025). Improving Operational Effectiveness in Non-Profit Organizations and Social Enterprises. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/8254