Partial Completion as a Nonprofit Strategy

Problem definition: Faced with the challenge of serving beneficiaries with heterogeneous needs and under budget constraints, some nonprofit organizations (NPOs) have adopted an innovative solution: providing partially complete products or services to beneficiaries. We seek to understand what drives an NPO’s choice of partial completion as a design strategy and how it interacts with the level of variety offered in the NPO’s product or service portfolio. Academic/practical relevance: Although partial product or service provision has been observed in the nonprofit operations, there is limited understanding of when it is an appropriate strategy—a void that we seek to fill in this paper. Methodology: We synthesize the practices of two NPOs operating in different contexts to develop a stylized analytical model to study an NPO’s product/service completion and variety choices. Results: We identify when and to what extent partial completion is optimal for an NPO. We also characterize a budget allocation structure for an NPO between product/service variety and completion. Our analysis sheds light on how beneficiary characteristics (e.g., heterogeneity of their needs, capability to self-complete) and NPO objectives (e.g., total-benefit maximization versus fairness) affect the optimal levels of variety and completion. Managerial implications: We provide three key observations. (1) Partial completion is not a compromise solution to budget limitations but can be an optimal strategy for NPOs under a wide range of circumstances, even in the presence of ample resources. (2) Partial provision is particularly valuable when beneficiary needs are highly heterogeneous, or beneficiaries have high self-completion capabilities. A higher self-completion capability generally implies a lower optimal completion level; however, it may lead to either a higher or a lower optimal variety level. (3) Although providing incomplete products may appear to burden beneficiaries, a lower completion level can be optimal when fairness is factored into an NPO’s objective or when beneficiary capabilities are more heterogeneous.

Duke Scholars

Author Can Zhang Fuqua School of Business