POMS Annual Conference in Washington: Turrini, Besiou and Meissner win best paper award

Laura Turrini, Professor Jörn Meissner, Professor Maria Besiou

A paper submitted to the 26th annual POMS Conference in Washington D.C. by KLU PhD candidate Laura Turrini and professors Maria Besiou and Joern Meissner received the “Best Paper” award for the humanitarian operations and crisis management track.

POMS is an annual conference organized by the Production and Operations Management Society. This year’s theme is “RELEVANCE: Expanding POM research, teaching, and practice to help organizations, society, economies, and the environment.” The theme is developed through 24 different tracks. The paper submitted by Turrini, Besiou, and Meissner is called “Understanding Fundraising in Humanitarian Supply Chains.”

International humanitarian organizations (IHOs) frequently implement both development and disaster response programs. Based on the operational needs of the programs, IHOs estimate the operations-related expenditures and then appeal for donations. Their operations and their actual operational expenditures depend on the donations they receive. They face budget constraints: some programs are over-funded while others are under-funded.

Turrini, Besiou and Meissner on their paper: “In this paper, we use multiple regression analysis to estimate the responsiveness of donations to a number of variables, including fund-raising costs, budget appeal and area/country where the program will take place. Next, we link donations to actual operational expenditures. We also study whether some operating expenses require greater fund-raising effort than others. We use data from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), one of the largest IHOs. The data on development programs come from the 243 development programs that IFRC implemented in the period 2010–2012 and the data on disaster response cover the 80 disasters that IFRC responded to from January 2010 to April 2014.”

More information about Laura Turrini.

More information about Maria Besiou.

More information about Jörn Meissner.