Author Archive

Creating a national outcomes-based financing Data Advisory Council (DAC) to capture and share best practices for using data to measure the social impact of outcomes-based financing.  The investment community’s understanding of the impact made by outcome-based financing is hampered by a lack of data. As of now, there are no centralized, holistic databases of impact [...]

Third Sector is leading a team selected as one of three grand prize winners of the Government Effectiveness Advanced Research (GEAR) Center Challenge. The GEAR Center competition challenged respondents and problem solvers from the public, academia, and industry to build cross-sector, multidisciplinary teams to demonstrate the potential of the GEAR Center as a public-private partnership [...]

Recently USAID published a guide for “Setting, Pricing, and Administering Performance Metrics in Pay-for-Results Programming.” The guide is intended to help those within USAID understand the basics of Pay-for-Results (PfR) contracts, their connection to current contracting practices and authorities, and how to think through the design of a new project. Third Sector contributed by sharing our experiences and how the lessons we learned in our work in domestic human services are equally applicable in the international development context.

Our experience shows that there are six critical aspects when developing an outcome-based

On December 13th, the Stanford Social Innovation Review published "Development Impact Bonds: There's Still No Free Lunch" by Kevin Starr. Please read our response below. Dear Kevin, Thank you for starting a conversation on development impact bonds (DIBs), as well as Pay for Success (PFS) more generally. As a practitioner of PFS, I wanted to share [...]

This post originally appeared on Nonprofit Finance Fund’s Blog and is co-authored by Deirdre Flynn, Associate Director, Pay for Success Program.

The Pay for Success (PFS) field has gone through astonishing changes in the years since the first contracts launched in the US. Those early projects (Rikers Island, Massachusetts Juvenile Justice, New York CEO, Cuyahoga) all only wavered from the original concept in minor ways. In brief, those projects all had payment based on a Randomized Control Trial (RCT) evaluation with the vast majority of success payments linked to the formal population-level

Through our work with governments, we think critically about how social services are contracted. Data availability is often a limiting factor in the project design or in the evaluation of a project’s success. Many of our projects benefit from timely access to data in order to evaluate the unmet need, identify characteristics of the intended [...]