Government is increasingly commissioning for outcomes, not activities. Payment by outcomes contracts and social impact bonds tie funding directly to results, and getting the structure right, what’s measured, how risk is shared, how returns are calculated, is specialist work. We help organisations assess whether this approach makes sense for them, design the model, write the EOI, negotiate the contract, and report on impact over its life.
Our first experience with social impact bonds was helping design the Benevolent Society bond in NSW in 2012. Since then, we’ve designed payment by outcomes contracts and social impact bonds across a wide range of outcomes areas, including:
- Improve health, education and enterprise outcomes in remote Indigenous communities
- Reduce reoffending rates among women in Queensland
- Reduce homelessness in young people exiting care in Victoria
- Reduce hospital transfers for aged care residents
- Improve outcomes for aged care residents
- Prevent family breakdown and children entering out of home care
- Improve early childhood education
- Reduce homelessness for young people
- Improve employment outcomes for people experiencing long term unemployment
- Improve access to healthy food for remote Aboriginal communities
- Provide employment for women with an experience of domestic and family violence
We’ve also designed a development impact bond to improve outcomes for subsistence farmers in Papua New Guinea, in partnership with DFAT.
In late 2017, we launched a social benefit bond in Queensland with Churches of Christ in Queensland, focused on increasing the resilience of young people exiting statutory care and reducing their risk of homelessness. This bond completed in 2024, with outstanding outcomes for young people and solid returns for impact investors, proof that outcomes contracting can work for both sides when it’s designed properly.
We also ran sessions for the Office of Social Impact at Queensland Treasury on PBO design and measurement approaches.
We are one of very few firms in Australia with deep experience across the full outcomes contracting cycle, from feasibility through to contract completion.
