This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Nonprofit organizations have historically struggled with underfunding, scarce resources and even identifying what physical, human, social and financial capital they already have. But what if there were an easy way they could share surplus assets with other social enterprises to make better use of their collective resources and increase their community impact?
That question led to the creation of SWAP (Sharing With A Purpose), a marketplace for nonprofit organizations to share surplus resources with one another with the help of a technology platform and advanced algorithms. SWAP is already showing promising results, as detailed in a paper published in the journal Operations Research. Pazour, both industrial and systems engineering professors at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), co-designed SWAP with collaborators from WPI.
The premise of SWAP is that nonprofits often have surplus resources that fluctuate seasonally, monthly or even weekly. They can offer those resources to obtain resources shared by collaborating nonprofits. The authors believe SWAP is the first sharing system that facilitates resource exchanges in which organizations can obtain resources by offering their own.
The goal is to maximize collective benefit. "We try to find the exchange that has the maximum total surplus," Trapp explained. "We found that people don't always have ideas of what they have available to offer," he added.
The study focused on two cohorts of nonprofits in Maryland, where the SWAP team conducted a controlled pilot test of the SWAP Hub software platform and the SWAPcredit trading mechanism, which enables diverse resources to be exchanged (e.g., use of a conference room in exchange for an organization's staff time and expertise to improve an Excel report). SWAP provides a base for nonprofits to form markets, offer and bid on shared resources, and coordinate multilateral exchange. SWAP was developed through what the project calls "community co-design," which brings together researchers, nonprofit specialists and legal aid to help build sustainable connections between participating organizations.
Participating organizations helped shape the platform through its design, feature development, user testing and refinement. "The technology is only one part of what makes SWAP work," Pazour said. Each cohort member has an initial endowment of credits that it can use to bid on resources offered by others in the cohort.
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