Commitments Playbook
“We are not just going to be waiting for legislation… I’ve got a phone that allows me to convene Americans from every walk of life––non-profits, businesses, the private sector, universities––to try to bring more and more Americans together around what I think is a unifying theme.”
— President Obama, January 14, 2014
The Challenge
Solving our biggest societal challenges—whether in science, education, health, or climate—requires action from a diverse mix of actors: companies, nonprofits, researchers, governments, investors, and more. Each holds a piece of the puzzle, but no single entity can solve the problem alone.
Too often, efforts to drive progress stall because:
Leaders are working in silos without coordination.
There’s no shared sense of timing, urgency, or measurable progress.
Existing tools like legislation or market incentives are too slow, too rigid, or politically constrained.
Yet many individuals and institutions are ready to act. What’s missing is a structured way to channel that readiness into collective momentum and urgency toward important goals.
The Play
The commitments model provides a framework for coordinated action—leveraging artificial deadlines, public calls to action, and shared accountability—to rally diverse stakeholders around a common objective. Here’s a step-by-step guide to putting it into practice:
Define a bold, outcome-driven goal: Start by articulating a goal that’s big enough to inspire, but clear enough to drive action. What problem are you trying to solve? What does success look like in 3–5 years?
Map your dream commitments: Use a thought experiment: imagine you have a “magic laptop” that turns press releases into reality. Write your dream announcement:
A bold headline stating the goal
A few paragraphs of context and rationale
1–2 paragraphs per commitment, following the formula: Organization A commits to take action B to achieve outcome C
Think expansively—these actors can include governments, philanthropists, companies, researchers, skilled volunteers, and more.
Secure anchor commitments: Share your vision with a few trusted partners and invite them to be early adopters. Having 1–3 prominent “anchor” commitments helps build credibility and momentum for others to join.
Issue a call to action: Launch a public or semi-public call for commitments, ideally led or endorsed by a well-known figure or institution. Be sure to include what Tim O'Reilly calls an architecture of participation—a clear explanation of how different types of stakeholders can get involved.
Host a commitments workshop or design session: Organize a focused convening to brainstorm and shape specific commitments. Having influential stakeholders in the room can attract interest and accelerate decision-making.
Create urgency with a deadline: Set a clear timeline by scheduling an event where commitments will be announced. If possible, align with an existing high-profile event to increase visibility and drive urgency. Deadlines unlock decision-making.
What makes a good commitment?
The commitments model works not because it mandates change, but because it unlocks voluntary, high-leverage action from a wide variety of stakeholders. When well-designed, commitments can drive change by mobilizing unique organizational assets, unlocking cross-sector collaboration, and creating public accountability. The model works particularly well when:
Key leaders are willing to apply their convening power.
Financial or reputational incentives are aligned with action.
Media attention or deadlines (like a major event) create urgency and momentum.
Compared to binding legislation or incentive-based systems, commitments allow for speed, flexibility, and innovation. They can be catalytic—unlocking action that would otherwise stall due to risk-aversion, bureaucratic inertia, or lack of coordination. At the same time, maintaining momentum requires follow-up mechanisms, transparency, and ongoing convening power. Strong commitments tend to share four key traits:
Leverage Core Competencies: Commitments should take advantage of the “core competencies” of the organizations that are making them. It is worth asking, which organization is in a unique position to do X? For example, Wal-Mart agreed to green their supply chain at a CGI annual meeting. This had a huge impact, since Wal-Mart has many suppliers and enormous influence over their supply chain. Time Warner made a commitment to connect 1 million students to high-quality after-school STEM programs, taking advantage of their reach as the producer of popular TV shows.
Metrics: Commitments should be new, specific, and measurable. A good template for a commitment is that, “Over the next X years, organization A commits to take action B with the goal of achieving outcome C.”
It is also useful if the commitments have a cumulative impact and value (e.g. these commitments have a total financial and in-kind value of $X and will help Y students excel in STEM education).
Accountability & Follow-Through: To ensure commitments translate into real impact, there must be mechanisms for follow-through. This can include:
Public dashboards or progress reports to increase transparency
Independent verification or third-party evaluation to validate results
Designated backbone organizations or funders to track and steward progress
Milestone-based funding structures that incentivize continued action
Regular check-ins or convenings to re-surface commitments and renew urgency
In some cases, coalitions can collectively hold members accountable; in others, funders, host organizations, or high-profile conveners can play this role. Without structures for accountability, even the best-designed commitments risk fading into the background.
Partnership & Collective Impact:
Flexible Partnership: In some instances, organization A can be “willing but not able,” and organization B can help relax whatever constraint organization A is operating under. Even organizations that play critical roles in our economy and our society, such as large public pension funds with hundreds of billions of assets under management, operate under important constraints. Commitments that address these constraints can have a large, catalytic impact.
Collective Impact: Many commitments involve multiple organizations that can have a collective impact greater than any one single organization. To understand “collective impact” – see http://collectiveimpactforum.org/what-collective-impact
Failure Modes
Case Studies
Frontier Climate
In 2022, a coalition of companies and philanthropies came together to launch Frontier, an advanced market commitment (AMC) to accelerate the development of permanent carbon removal technologies.
Spearheaded by Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and McKinsey, Frontier aimed to send a strong, early demand signal to a nascent sector critical to long-term climate goals.
Over time, Frontier has committed more than $1.2 billion to purchase permanent carbon removal between now and 2030. While these purchases represent only a fraction of the world’s annual carbon emissions, they serve a catalytic role: reducing risk for innovators, creating incentives for early R&D investment, and drawing in new entrants and funders.
This involved:
Defining a bold, outcome-driven goal: Accelerate the development of permanent carbon removal solutions.
Mapping dream commitments: The Frontier team issued a clear call to action: companies and philanthropies could become “buyers” and commit funds upfront to purchase tons of carbon removed in the future. This allowed startups working on carbon removal to build with confidence that there would be a future market.
Securing anchor commitments: Stripe first piloted small-scale purchases, and then launched Frontier with $925 million in advance purchase commitments from four major tech firms and McKinsey. These early movers set a precedent and signaled serious intent, which helped attract broader attention.
Creating an architecture of participation: Frontier provided a structured and transparent framework for how new actors—corporates, funders, and scientists—could get involved. It handled technical diligence, standardized contracting, and publicized learnings from the portfolio, allowing others to plug into a shared infrastructure.
What made it work:
Leverage of core competencies: The founding companies used their purchasing power, brand credibility, and technical teams to validate and catalyze a new market—playing a role governments were too slow to fill.
Specific, measurable commitments: Frontier’s initial buyers pledged more than $900 million in carbon removal purchases by 2030. It now manages an expanding portfolio of early-stage projects, each with clear tonnage targets and cost trajectories.
Accountability and follow-through: Frontier publicly reports on its portfolio of suppliers and purchase prices. It publishes updates on methodology and learning, helping create a shared knowledge base for the entire sector.
Collective impact and partnership: By pooling resources, Frontier reduced risk for individual buyers while increasing the reliability and credibility of demand for suppliers. This collective structure also enabled smaller organizations to participate alongside large ones by joining the buying pool.
Potential for replication:
Frontier illustrates how the commitments model can be used to create and shape entirely new markets—particularly in areas where early buyers are crucial for unlocking innovation. Going forward, this model could be extended to other hard-to-abate sectors (e.g., low-carbon cement, clean hydrogen, zero-emission shipping).
Renaissance Philanthropy CEO Tom Kalil has served as an advisor to Frontier since its launch.
UK Biobank
In 2022, members of our team launched a collaboration with the UK Biobank to scale its infrastructure and do more advanced imaging and genomic sequencing of patients. Ultimately, with help from partners, we were able to raise £48 million in commitments, including an £8 million in-kind contribution of cloud storage from AWS. This involved:
Working with the UK Biobank to identify specific goals it had (e.g. expanding its collection of advanced genomic and imaging data)
Issuing a call to action to philanthropists anchored by a matching commitment from the UK government
Creating an architecture of participation which enabled many actors, not just philanthropists, to participate (e.g. AWS).
You can read more about our effort to use the commitments model to scale the UK Biobank here.
100Kin10
In 2010, a group of White House staffers including Renaissance Philanthropy President Kumar Garg developed a plan to use the commitments model to achieve an ambitious goal: adding 100,000 science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) teachers by 2021. The initiative ultimately exceeded its goal, with 108,000 new STEM teachers trained by 2021. This involved:
Identifying a challenge (a shortage of STEM educators) and setting a concrete goal (100,000 new STEM teachers) to address it
Issuing a call to action from a prominent stakeholder – In his 2011 State of the Union address, President Obama announced the goal with a public call to action
Creating an operating hub for the effort — more than 300 education institutions, policymakers, STEM experts, and leaders in philanthropy came together under the banner of 100kin10, a national network dedicated to achieving this goal
Potential applications of the commitments model
Building on the example of Frontier Climate, the commitments model can accelerate the use of market-shaping approaches to create demand for products with high social value but low commercial viability. This could include working with companies, philanthropists, and governments to identify, design, and launch the next 3–5 major initiatives in sectors contributing at least 0.5 Gt of CO₂e annually. Key steps may include:
CEO-level outreach to identify sectors where companies are willing to make bold, time-bound commitments—expanding on efforts like the First Movers Coalition.
Partnering with technical and policy experts to structure effective demand-side mechanisms such as advance market commitments (AMCs), milestone payments, off-take agreements, volume guarantees, or pooled purchasing platforms.
How we can help
Renaissance Philanthropy is interested in using the commitments model to advance our mission of fueling a 21st century renaissance by increasing the ambition of scientists, innovators, and philanthropists. Specifically, we are focused on:
Surfacing ambitious goals: We work with partners to identify ambitious, high-leverage goals—such as the Learning Engineering Virtual Institute’s effort to double the rate of progress in middle school math for low-income students—and design commitments that meaningfully contribute to achieving them.
Issuing compelling calls to action: We aim to activate a wide range of stakeholders by issuing public calls to action, ideally in partnership with influential institutions or leaders who can lend visibility, credibility, and urgency.
Creating urgency through time-bound catalysts: We leverage artificial deadlines—such as high-profile events, multi-year funding cycles, or policy windows—to drive action. These can include events we host or partner on, funding timelines that align with key decision points, or moments when policy frameworks open new opportunities for sustained engagement.