As the UK marks Volunteering Week, The OR Society is pleased to announce that its Pro Bono Operational Research (OR) volunteers have now completed over 200 free projects for UK charities. These skilled professionals have offer vital support to third sector organisations, often stepping in to solve the most complex and tricky challenges where there are no obvious answers.
Isma Shafqat, Pro Bono Manager at The Operational Research Society, explains the significance of this milestone: “With charities facing increased demand and tighter budgets, many are using operational research – a scientific, data-driven approach to decision-making. Our expert volunteers contribute their time and skills to help charities plan, adapt, and improve their work, especially when faced with problems that lack straightforward solutions.”
The Pro Bono OR scheme provides charities with various types of support. This includes strategic planning and data analysis, which helps them make informed decisions even in uncertain situations. Volunteers also assist with improving daily operations and measuring their impact.
For example, volunteers helped The Welcome Centre streamline how they support people in crisis, enabling them to manage growing needs more effectively despite complex operational hurdles.
They assisted RUHX, an NHS charity, in understanding their donors better, leading to more focused and effective fundraising campaigns that improved supporter engagement by uncovering insights from vast amounts of data.
The scheme also provides help to smaller charities. The Harvey Hext Trust, a bereavement charity that provides personalised Memory Boxes and Bears to grieving children, greatly benefited. Without a structured way to track their impact, an OR volunteer helped them build a functional database from past invoices – to solve a critical data management challenge. This new system allows the Trust to clearly measure their achievements, identify areas needing more support, and strengthen future grant applications.
In a recent project, volunteers worked with Off the Fence Trust’s Gateway Women’s Centre, which supports vulnerable people in Brighton and Hove. Here, OR volunteers helped them create a performance dashboard in PowerBI, providing a clear view of their programme activities and allowing for evidence-based reporting for their annual impact report – a complex task of integrating disparate data.
“These examples demonstrate how operational research can make a significant difference, particularly by tackling those difficult questions where intuition alone isn’t enough,” adds Shafqat. “Our Pro Bono OR scheme offers crucial support, especially when many charities have limited resources, providing a unique and valuable tool to address problems they might otherwise be unable to tackle.”
The OR Society is actively looking for more charities who could benefit from this expert, free support.
To learn more about The OR Society’s Pro Bono OR scheme and how to receive support, please visit: https://www.theorsociety.com/ORS/Outreach/Pro-Bono/Pro-Bono-OR.aspx
