News
Good Finance launches Social Impact Bonds toolkit
There must be something in the water. Hot on the heels of the GO Lab rejigging their website to become a “go to” resource on social impact bonds, the folk of Good Finance have launched their own SIB “toolkit”… which is a rather glamorous way of describing a set of multiple-choice questionnaires administered by a website, but let’s be honest, no one would click through if you described it the other way, would they?
The Good Finance toolkit will help you discover whether your “mindset, programme and organisation” are appropriately aligned with the SIB concept, explain the fundamentals of the vehicle, and take you through the design process step by step.
We noted back in May that some advocates of the SIB model are publicly fretting that maybe they’ve just not been selling it right, and in June we mentioned an essay in the Stanford Social Innovation Review which suggested that the SIB model is inherently at risk of perverse outcomes, because the only bids that get funded are those that offer high returns for low risks. And all the way back in April, two GO Lab academics published a paper looking at how successfully SIBs can balance the needs of the commissioner against the opportunism of the supplier (which concluded “it doesn’t look like it, but more research is needed”). Clearly someone somewhere thinks they’re a great idea, but it’s really not clear what that assessment is being based upon…