PFS Guidance: Briefs and Reports
Assessing Feasibility Studies
Pay for success (PFS) shifts the risk of funding a program from traditional funders (usually a government) to investors that are repaid if the intervention achieves predetermined outcomes. PFS doesn’t work for all programs or in all contexts (Milner et al. 2016). At a minimum, practitioners need to decide whether expected outcomes can be measured and agree upon a performance threshold for repayment. Effectively addressing these two factors is a complex process, which is why it is common to begin any proposed PFS project with a feasibility study.
Understanding Community Resources: A Tool for Data Landscaping
Groups interested in launching collaborative interventions that span different service sectors need to find ways to build trust and share data and insights. Gathering and analyzing administrative data across agencies and programs can be enormously powerful. Sharing administrative data can help groups better target services, identify and eliminate inefficiencies, expand evidence-based programs, and implement performance-based approaches and funding models, such as pay for success (PFS).
Guidance on Collecting Administrative Data for Pay for Success Projects
Administrative data—that is, the information collected by governments and organizations about the people they serve—are a rich resource for strengthening programs and services. But accessing and using such data from the different systems and agencies that house them is often difficult. Moreover, many organizations face significant learning curves when it comes to navigating privacy and data security requirements, drafting legal agreements, completing complex analyses, and other processes associated with using administrative data.
Developing a Collaborative Planning Team
A collaborative planning team (CPT) is essential for managing the data-related aspects of a project, including those funded through Pay for Success (PFS) or another performance-based financing structure. A CPT is composed of stakeholders with access to administrative data from multiple service systems and could be tasked with gathering and analyzing linked data, understanding the population needs across systems or how services are used, or designing an intervention to address a social problem.
How to Launch a Supportive Housing Pay for Success Initiative
Permanent supportive housing helps solve our country’s homelessness crisis by improving housing stability and reducing the use of public services. The permanent supportive housing approach is backed up by promising evidence, but it can face barriers to implementation because of a lack of political will and budgetary constraints. Some local governments are exploring a financing model called pay for success (PFS), which shifts the financial risk from traditional funders (typically a government) to alternative investors, such as foundations or banks.