Innovations in PFS

This article originally appeared on the Living Cities’ blog as a part of their new series which celebrates the five year anniversary of their first PFS project, and shares reflections from them and their partners on new directions in PFS. For updates, follow their Pay for Success Newsletter.

Nearly one in every seven youth and young adults across the United States are neither employed nor in school. Nationwide, this amounts to approximately six million disconnected or “opportunity youth” who face barriers to employment, including limited community resources, low-performing schools, and inadequate assistance from

For the past five months, I’ve been helping Third Sector research the nascent field of social impact accounting – the practice of measuring and quantifying the social impact of organizations and investments.  Third Sector was interested in exploring the demand for social impact accounting among investors and philanthropic organizations, as well as investigating opportunities to apply the lessons the firm has learned from its Pay for Success work more broadly.

While generalized social impact accounting principles are accepted and widely used today, they are a relatively recent development: The Financial Accounting

This post originally appeared on the AEA365 blog as part of their SIM TIG Week.

Hello! We are Brian Beachkofski and Jeannie Friedman, Pay for Success (PFS) advisors at Third Sector Capital Partners. We spend most of our time assessing feasibility and designing social sector programs with rigorous evaluations and evidence-based interventions embedded into their contracting structure.

PFS is an innovative contracting model (shown in the figure below) that drives government resources toward high-performing social programs. The PFS model is designed to merge performance measurement using administrative data and rigorous evaluation of

The prevalence of data in the social sector means that government agencies and nonprofit providers, in theory, have a wealth of information at their disposal to understand what works and more effectively deploy resources to achieve better outcomes. Administrative data (data collected by governments or nonprofits as part of administering a specific program) in particular provides a cost-effective and accurate way to understand participant outcomes and break the silos between agencies serving similar populations who operate in different policy domains.

The practical reality is that providers and government agencies cannot easily

This article originally appeared on America Forward’s blog as a part of their Evidence in Action series. Follow along on Twitter with #EvidenceinAction and catch up on the series here.

Thanks to the persistence of social entrepreneurs across the country, every day we see strategies that are working and delivering results in a rapidly changing world. This Evidence in Action blog series highlights the voices of the more than 70 social innovation organizations that make up the America Forward Coalition, the results-driven solutions our community has for our country’s most pressing social

Social impact is a dynamic and growing field, with many different types of actors who each have unique strategies and goals. The Wharton Social Impact Conference, hosted by the Wharton Social Impact Initiative, brought together leaders in the space to discuss their approaches, emphasizing innovative tools and models.  While social impact crosses fields, many practitioners are thinking about common themes, directly related to our work at Third Sector. As we bring together stakeholders to orient social services towards outcomes, we often think about how to best leverage data, the long-term