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

When we started Third Sector six years ago, my co-founders and I had a fundamental assumption: the increasing availability of data would empower government to allocate its resources to programs that measurably improve lives. We began by testing Pay for Success (PFS) as a contracting tool to catalyze this shift.

Six years and six PFS contracts later, we are proud of our work reallocating over $100M in public sector funding to outcomes-driven programs. But we have also found our central assumption challenged in three ways:

Public sector data infrastructure is not built

Brian Beachkofski leads Third Sector’s efforts in data, evaluation, and modeling to include developing and executing strategy, capturing best practices, and providing training.

This post is based off a recent speech I made at the Harvard University Center on Education Policy Research for a meeting of the Proving Ground partners. Proving Ground is an initiative committed to helping education agencies meet their practical needs, by making evidence cheaper, faster, and easier to use. Their goal is to make evidence-gathering and evidence-use an intuitive part of how education agencies conduct their daily

Brian Beachkofski leads Third Sector’s efforts in data, evaluation, and modeling to include developing and executing strategy, capturing best practices, and providing training.

This post is based off a recent speech I made at the Harvard University Center on Education Policy Research for a meeting of the Proving Ground partners. Proving Ground is an initiative committed to helping education agencies meet their practical needs, by making evidence cheaper, faster, and easier to use. Their goal is to make evidence-gathering and evidence-use an intuitive part of how education agencies conduct their daily

Brian Beachkofski leads Third Sector’s efforts in data, evaluation, and modeling to include developing and executing strategy, capturing best practices, and providing training.

This post is based off a recent speech I made at the Harvard University Center on Education Policy Research for a meeting of the Proving Ground partners. Proving Ground is an initiative committed to helping education agencies meet their practical needs, by making evidence cheaper, faster, and easier to use. Their goal is to make evidence-gathering and evidence-use an intuitive part of how education agencies conduct their daily

The Pay for Success (PFS) movement has spread to countries around the world. Each country has done PFS for slightly different reasons. For example: in the United Kingdom, PFS has generally angled as a way to get ‘more for less’, whereas in the US, PFS has been viewed by many as a way to test and scale up innovative social programs.

I grew up in Singapore and Hong Kong, and have spent the past two years executing PFS projects around the US.  I believe that PFS could provide a unique value