“The fundamental idea of the Outcomes Marketplace is to move away from project-based financing to donors purchasing outcomes,” says Kevin Teo, AVPN’s chief technology officer and head of ImpactCollab. “They are essentially buying social outcome results, and they only pay when the results are being delivered, which is very different from how donors fund projects, workshops or training, often with the goal of a student or a participant attaining a certain future state.”
However, this “future state” — such as securing a job — is often left out of the conversation. Instead, funders accept the specifications of the project itself as a measurement of success.
“You say this is the number of people who got trained, and you say ‘mission accomplished’. So, that’s the fundamental shift [with the Outcomes Marketplace],” says Teo to The Edge Singapore.
Starting with youth employability as a social outcome in Thailand, Teo’s team has set its sights on Singapore next. His team has also had “early conversations” about launching the social outcome in India, where AVPN will hold its next annual conference in August 2026.
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The Outcomes Marketplace will choose problems that are “pertinent on a national scale”, says Teo. “Niche projects tend to be very expensive for outcomes-based funding from an administrative cost perspective. [But] when you are able to engage, at a national scale, issues like getting young people into jobs, then we have economies of scale in terms of evaluation and making sure that the results are delivered.”
In Thailand, the Equitable Education Fund (EEF) has been receiving funding to deliver programmes promoting equitable education and human development across the nation. Established under the Equitable Education Act 2018, the independently managed public fund is under the supervision of the Thai Prime Minister.
“They’ve been using that to get organisations on board and to lay the groundwork to have this conversation of shifting the funding model,” says Teo.
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Working on the youth employability outcome in Thailand are five organisations serving as training providers.
These firms are not new; the Outcomes Marketplace has simply reframed funding for the existing infrastructure from the project level to an “outcomes-sellers perspective”, says Teo. “The ones buying outcomes would be philanthropic entities, private wealth donors and governments.”
Price discovery
In order to sell verified social outcomes to donors with confidence, the Outcomes Marketplace must arrive at fair and comparable prices.
Within the outcome of youth employability, for example, there could “potentially be several tiers of intervention”, says Teo.
“Intervening in an urban environment would likely be a lower-cost setup because people are more concentrated, whereas intervening in a rural environment could be more expensive because they are dispersed. We are creating a few of these outcome categories and then having an associated price per category,” he adds.
Tri-Sector Associates is developing this rate card. The social enterprise is known for its “pay-for-success” mechanism, which introduces a guarantor that may step in to pay the outcome funder if the intended outcomes are not achieved.
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“It’s a market discovery process. Right now, you’ve got all these different players out there running programmes, and they may or may not know what others are charging for the project. But as we feed more data into this system, there’s greater transparency,” says Teo.
He adds: “We can start working out a cost for a project based on the cohort size, [which] computes to a price per participant, for example. As we make all this information available across the market, they can start seeing how they cluster around common practice. The idea, then, is that for funders, it doesn’t seem entirely whimsical as to what is the cost for the project, or what is the cost for the outcome; it starts taking better shape in the social economy.”
In a LinkedIn post, Tri-Sector Associates says outcomes-based funding gives service providers the flexibility to focus on quality over quantity. “It incentivises better performance and transparency [and] it unlocks opportunities for new, innovative providers who can now compete on results.”
The social enterprise adds: “Instead of asking ‘What programme should I fund?’, we now ask: ‘What impact do I want to see, and what is that worth?’”
Reaching private bankers
AVPN launched ImpactCollab in April 2024 at the AVPN Global Conference 2024 in Abu Dhabi, with support from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). The Gates Foundation later joined to support the initiative.
The launch marked the start of a three-year plan that aims to feature up to 1,200 impact organisations on the ImpactCollab platform, across the target markets of Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, India and China.
According to Teo, there are now some 500 “credible organisations” on ImpactCollab for AVPN members, grantmakers and wealth and philanthropy advisers to support.
In June, Teo said ImpactCollab aims to mobilise US$100 million ($127.90 million) by 2030. To achieve this, the platform is targeting private bankers, where the potential for philanthropic deployment remains “largely untapped”.
Although there are 2,000 family offices, more than 300,000 millionaires and US$1.2 trillion of wealth under management in Singapore, AVPN says private bankers and wealth managers here are not familiar with philanthropy.
Teo said in June that there are fewer than 10 full-time philanthropy advisers within Singapore’s private banking sector, compared to more than 5,000 relationship managers based here.
Speaking to The Edge Singapore, Teo says he knows this handful of philanthropy advisers personally, but nearly half of them have left their roles.
Still, ImpactCollab is making some headway in getting private bankers on board the platform.
In March, Citi Private Bank launched its philanthropy advisory solutions in Singapore, allowing its clients here to establish donor-advised funds (DAF) or donate through its two registered charity partners: the Community Foundation of Singapore and AVPN.
A DAF is a fund account for charitable donations, managed by a sponsor such as AVPN. With a minimum sum of US$250,000, Citi Private Bank’s global family office group will connect clients with relevant charities for philanthropic contributions.
Meanwhile, a number of other private banks — including Pictet, LGT Bank and J.P. Morgan Private Bank — are identifying client interest with AVPN’s support, says Teo. “They’ve connected us with some of their clients [and] some have already come on board, which is different from creating a product first and trying to sell the product.”
A seven-strong business development team from ImpactCollab is engaging with these private banks, says Teo, “to take them through the training process and the orientation of the platform”. “What has worked is client lunches. Private banks do client lunches all the time, and they’re usually trying to sell a product. You could do a client lunch around a philanthropy topic, and clients who are interested will sign up. That is absolutely something we want to do more [of].”
Growing the database
Despite ImpactCollab’s rapid growth, Teo says the 500 names on the platform are but “a drop in the bucket” compared to China and India. “India alone has a million NGOs… We need to have much deeper coverage of the impact organisation ecosystem.”
Private wealth-holders have their “own bespoke and specific interests”, he says. “We need to find something for everyone. Not everyone is looking for a World Vision or a WWF; others might want to do something that’s very local, or might not even show up in English. Because they are run by hyper-local stakeholders, they might not have reams of SOPs or governance policies, but they’re doing impactful work.”
Teo adds: “If we believe that these types of organisations form the social fabric of the entire community, then they totally deserve to be profiled and supported.”
Teo joined AVPN in 2011 as its first employee. The network has grown to include more than 700 members, “many of whom are grantmakers”, says Teo. “As grantmakers, they have a database of prior grants that they’ve made. They have a portfolio of organisations that get supported, so we are setting up data-sharing agreements with these members.”
The Gates Foundation, for example, has made its 38,000-entry grant database available online. “We’re going through the process of pulling in all this data, because there are very useful signals in all this. Firstly, it tells us who the impact organisation is. Secondly, it tells us that a credible funder like The Gates Foundation has supported them before. Those are things that we can pull into the ImpactCollab system and use to present possible opportunities for donors to look into.”
Read more about the AVPN Global Conference 2025:
Four Asian organisations among world’s top 20 ‘corporate givers’
Read more about ImpactCollab:
AVPN launches second phase of philanthropy platform ImpactCollab with MAS, Gates Foundation support (June)
AVPN launches social investing system in Abu Dhabi with MAS support (April 2024)
Read more about philanthropy and impact investing:
Rethinking philanthropy for a new global reality (May)
Philanthropy essential for societal innovation: Bill Gates (May)
Investing in peace: Why and how firms do it (April)
‘A time of great uncertainty’ for the philanthropy sector: AVPN CEO (February)
Costly data-gathering, impatient capital and few blended finance transactions limit impact investing in Asia: panel (September 2024)
Charity vs philanthropy: A clash of ideas at AVPN’s Abu Dhabi conference (May 2024)
