Through a generous grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Nonprofit Finance Fund (NFF) is providing resources to help service providers, governments, investors, and other stakeholders and interested parties work towards making Social Impact Bonds, Pay for Success Projects and closely related innovative social financing approaches (together “SIBs”) feasible in the United States on a systemic scale. If you're not yet a member of the site, sign up to access the full list of resources and networks.

What are SIBs?

SIBs are innovative approaches to financing social services that are built around a shared vision of achieving measurable social outcomes that produce “cashable” savings to funders of the services. The first SIBs model was pioneered in United Kingdom. In this SIBs model, an intermediary organization (sometimes described as a Social Impact Bond-Issuing Organization or SIBIO) raises capital from private investors to fund multi-year delivery of preventative or early intervention social service programs traditionally funded by government agencies on an annual basis. If social service providers are successful in achieving contractually agreed targets for performance and achievement outcome metrics, the government pays the investors, through the SIBIO, a return on their investment. This return on investment is funded from the savings produced in the population receiving the preventative or early intervention services by comparison to a defined population that has not. If the outcome targets are not achieved, the government does not pay.

As the practices around SIBs models continue to evolve around the world, different markets are devising their own adaptations to the original SIBs model that are being shaped, in large part, by the local facts and circumstances that are unique to each market. In the United States, SIBs are evolving in a noticeably more “bottom up” fashion than in most of the other markets, e.g., the United Kingdom, New South Wales, Canada and New Zealand. This makes for a more complex, fast moving and exciting process and for challenges in keeping the field informed and engaged.

Questions or Ideas? Send them to us!

NFF's website, SIBs Knowledge Network, is evolving as quickly as the field is, and we'd love to hear input and ideas from visitors to the site. Take our Feedback Survey and tell us what you're interested in. And if you see a SIBs resource missing, send us an email!

To learn more about NFF, visit our website at nonprofitfinancefund.org.