Open letter to the impact bond community

This is an open invitation to impact bond project parties to share specific information about their projects with the INDIGO network, supported by the Government Outcomes Lab.

Hello, impact bond community!

As an emerging data collaborative, we believe that helping more people share and use quality data will improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of impact bond projects. This is why we produce monthly snapshots of the impact bond landscape and are planning to write quarterly reports with key figures from our dataset.  

Thanks to your willingness to share your data and collaborate with us, we have produced a range of visualisations exploring the global impact bond landscape based on our Impact Bond Dataset. We wanted to share some of these exciting visualisations with you, and highlight opportunities for further collaboration. We are especially interested in data about:

• New or missing impact bond projects
  
• Start and end dates for service and outcome payments
  
• Different parties in impact bond projects
  
• Impact bond outcomes and UN Sustainable Development Goals

New or missing impact bond projects?

Our INDIGO map shows the distribution of over 200 impact bonds around the world. However, if you are aware of any impact bond projects that are not currently included in our dataset, please get in touch and let us know. We will get back to you with our INDIGO template and Data Dictionary to allow you to share details of the project. While we would like to include as much data as possible, we do not expect you to complete the entire spreadsheet for each project. There are different levels of priority, and as long as the level 1 variables are completed, we can upload the project to our database. 

Start and end dates for services and outcome payments?

We are also working with timelines, including this group of child welfare impact bonds, allowing us to analyse differences between the length of service delivery (red bar) and the duration of the contract (blue bar). Building these timelines requires four specific variables: ‘date outcomes contract signed’; ‘start date of service provision’; ‘anticipated end date of service provision’; and ‘anticipated completion date of the project’. If any of these dates for projects you have been involved in are missing, please share them and help us build timelines.

Different parties in impact bond projects?

Our dataset also looks deeper into projects, to examine the funds and organisations involved in impact bonds. We are exploring these entities and the relationships between them through network graphs, but we want to ensure that all of the parties are accurately represented. Please let us know if you are aware of an organisation that has played a role in an impact bond project, but does not appear in our organisation index.  

Impact bond outcomes and the UN Sustainable Development Goals?

At our past Hack and Learn (September 2020), one group spent some time linking social outcomes to SDGs. They built a Sankey diagram that shows how each project can target different sustainable development goals. This prototype only has data for a few projects, but we will have a challenge related to SDGs at our second Hack and Learn. Sign up and help us complete this diagram for all the projects in the dataset. Our next Hack and Learn will be co-hosted by INSPER Brazil, Ashoka University in India, Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation (Georgetown University), Bertha Center for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO).

Our next quarterly report

In April 2021, we will publish our first quarterly report on the impact bond dataset. If you would like to be considered for inclusion in our report or data visualisations, you need to provide information and/or data before 23 March. Instructions on how to share data with INDIGO or provide feedback can be found here. 

Barriers or concerns about sharing data? Issues with the data definitions?

There are three resources that can be useful when sharing data with INDIGO. 

1)    Our INDIGO template shows all the variables that we would like to know about an impact bond project. 

2)    Our Data Dictionary has all our data definitions and explains what information we are trying to capture in every variable.

3)    The INDIGO GitHub site has the open-source code of the database and more technical explanations of the data model behind the Impact Bond Dataset V2. 

If you’re still finding it difficult to share data with INDIGO, send us an email to indigo@bsg.ox.ac.uk and we will get in touch with you. Let’s learn together!