Category Archive for : ‘Blog’

“Hi Siri – what’s the weather today?”

“Okay Google, is there life on Mars?”

“Alexa, add toothpaste to my cart.”

It is hard to argue that data and technology have not fundamentally changed our day-to-day lives, in many ways for the better. Therefore, the growing application of data in the social sector has created general excitement across various stakeholders – government officials, service providers, and philanthropic partners. From assessing policy decisions to determining resource allocations, the use of data and evaluation is slowly becoming the norm rather than the exception.

In early October, Third Sector and our data partner, Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy (AISP), convened state and local government leaders from around the country to discuss effective steps to launching and sustaining Integrated Data Systems (IDS), as well as deploying that data to improve community outcomes. This was the third time the Empowering Families [...]

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

Signed into law this summer, the Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act – also known as Perkins V – includes a number of provisions that promote innovation, modernization and the alignment of workforce skills with labor-market needs (see our full summary here). Notably, the legislation also includes the first-ever federal authorization of Career and Technical Education (CTE) funding for Pay for Success.

This change unlocks the potential to accelerate gains in economic mobility for millions of Americans. Every year, $1.1 billion in CTE funding flows from the

In 2017, the U.S. Department of Education announced it awarded grants to a cohort of eight government organizations for a Preschool Pay For Success feasibility pilot, to explore how the Pay for Success (PFS) model can improve access to high-quality preschool and improve outcomes for children most at risk. Third Sector partnered with three of [...]

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 [...]