CSTIO Seminar with Dr Wolfram Wiesemann (Imperial College)

From Data to Donations: Optimal Fundraising Campaigns for Non-Profit Organizations

Abstract  

Non-profit organizations play an essential role in addressing global challenges, yet their financial sustainability often depends on raising funds through resource-intensive campaigns. We partner with a major international non-profit to develop and test data-driven approaches to enhance the efficiency of their fundraising efforts. The organization conducts multiple annually recurring campaigns, with thematic links between them. These connections enable us to predict a donor’s propensity to contribute to one campaign based on their behavior in others. This structure is common among non-profits but not readily utilized by conventional multi-armed bandit algorithms. To leverage these inter-campaign patterns, we design two algorithms that integrate concepts from the multi-armed bandit and clustering literature. We analyze the theoretical properties of both algorithms, and we empirically validate their effectiveness on both synthetic and real data from our partner organization.

About the speaker

Wolfram Wiesemann is Professor of Analytics & Operations as well as the head of the Analytics, Marketing & Operations department at Imperial College Business School. His research interests evolve around decision-making under uncertainty, with applications to supply chain management, healthcare and energy. Wolfram is an elected member of the boards of the Mathematical Optimization Society and the Stochastic Programming Society, and he currently serves as editor in-chief of Operations Research Letters as well as a department co-editor for Management Science.