Publications

Public systems are generally good at recognising the value of early support, prevention and long-term intervention – yet financing them through ordinary annual budgets has repeatedly proved difficult. The benefit typically arrives years later, lands in another institution’s budget, or falls to an entirely different actor. This report addresses exactly that problem: how outcomes-based contracting can help direct funding to where long-term public value is greatest, but financing is currently missing.

This report, Outcomes-Based Contracting: Financing Early Action and Long-Term Public Value, is the result of a multidisciplinary collaboration between ten researchers and experts across a network of nine organisations in Finland, Denmark, Austria, Slovenia, Australia and the United Kingdom. It brings together international evidence and practical experience of outcomes-based contracting and offers policymakers a practical framework for judging when the model fits, when it does not, and what responsible use requires: credible baseline data, risk adjustment, independent evaluation, community participation and sustained political commitment.

The work connects to a broader programme on financing methods for outcomes-based healthcare and on measuring public value, including the use of Productivity-Adjusted Life Years (PALYs) in health-economic evaluation. The report aims to give both Finnish wellbeing services counties and international partners usable tools for assessing when outcomes-based contracting genuinely supports earlier, more proactive action – not simply as a new financing technique, but as a way of reorganising responsibility, data and incentives around outcomes that matter.

Read the report:

• Skali, A., Martikainen, J., Ademi, Z., Turk, E., Arsovic Nielsen, D., Pyykkö, M., Münter, L., Koiste, V., Malkamäki, S., and Lane, J. (2026). Outcomes-Based Contracting: Financing Early Action and Long-Term Public Value. (pdf)

Alongside the report, we are publishing a shorter Policy Brief that distributes its main findings and recommendations for busy decision-makers.

• Policy Brief: Outcomes-Based Contracting: Financing Early Action and Long-Term Public Value. (pdf)

These three social marketing checklists have been developed to enhance both the understanding and implementation of social marketing. Each checklist was originally created and published as part of the Finnish Social Marketing Guidebook (Taiminen, Sormunen & Mäki-Opas, 2024).

The Principles of Social Marketing Checklist is based on the global consensus on social marketing principles, concepts, and techniques (ISMA, 2017).

The Social Marketing Process Checklist is informed by various social marketing planning frameworks. The Ethics Principles Checklist is an abbreviated version of the Social Marketing Statement of Ethics (Kubacki et al., 2023).

• Read the English version of the Social Marketing Checklists here.
• Or access them directly: PDF Link