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Contribution Net-Value Review

Valuation model — instantiates Net-Additive Contribution Intake

Weighs a contribution's expected benefit against its full lifetime coordination cost to judge whether it is genuinely net-additive — and recommends accept, reshape, redirect, defer, or decline.

Most intake decisions go wrong by comparing an offer's benefit against a cost of zero — it was donated, so it looks free. Contribution Net-Value Review is the assessment that refuses that framing. It prices the full lifetime coordination cost — evaluation, translation, supervision, integration, compliance, maintenance, eventual retirement, and the primary work displaced along the way — and sets it against benefit that is scored for marginal value: what the offer adds to the whole net of what the whole already has. Its defining move is that additivity is a difference, not a level. A genuinely good contribution that duplicates something you already run is not additive; a modest one that fills a real gap is. The output is not a grade but a disposition — accept, reshape, redirect, defer, or decline — because the point of pricing the offer is to decide what to do with it.

Example

A mid-sized regional history museum is offered a private collector's estate: several hundred objects, "free," with the family hoping the whole lot stays together. The curator runs a net-value review rather than a thank-you. On the benefit side, perhaps three items are genuinely rare and fill gaps in the museum's holdings. On the cost side sits everything the boundary hides: cataloguing hundreds of objects, conservation of the fragile ones, climate-controlled storage the museum is already short on, insurance, and the near-certainty of deaccessioning the ~80% that duplicates what it owns — a slow, legally fraught, reputation-sensitive process.

Scored net of redundancy, the collection is mostly not additive: three objects of real value carried on top of a decades-long storage-and-disposal liability. The review's disposition is not "decline" but reshape — accept the three items outright, redirect the remainder to a historical society whose collection they would genuinely complete, and decline the "keep it together" condition. What made that possible was refusing to treat donated as free.

How it works

  • Trace the cost past the boundary. The visible cost is intake; the real cost is the lifetime — supervision, integration, maintenance, and the retirement or removal cost when the contribution is eventually wound down. The model's job is to surface the costs that only appear after acceptance.
  • Score marginal, not absolute, value. Credit the offer for what it adds beyond current holdings, capabilities, or coverage. Redundant excellence scores low; a smaller offer that closes a real gap scores high.
  • Net the two and pick a disposition. Benefit-minus-full-cost maps to one of five moves. A positive but conditional result becomes reshape; a good offer aimed at the wrong recipient becomes redirect; genuine uncertainty becomes defer (often into a trial).

Tuning parameters

  • Cost horizon — one-time intake cost versus full lifetime including maintenance and retirement. Short horizons systematically flatter donated offers; the longer the horizon, the more hidden burden surfaces.
  • Redundancy threshold — how much overlap with existing holdings before value is discounted. Set it loose and you hoard duplicates; set it tight and you may decline a marginal-but-real gap-filler.
  • Displacement weighting — how heavily to price the primary work the coordinator gives up to absorb this. The scarcer the coordinator, the higher this weight should run.
  • Disposition granularity — a blunt accept/decline, or the full five-way rule. Finer granularity rescues good-but-misaimed offers via reshape and redirect instead of a flat no.

When it helps, and when it misleads

Its strength is dragging the hidden coordination cost into the same ledger as the benefit, which is exactly the comparison a grateful "yes" skips. It is what lets a system say a disciplined no to a good offer that simply isn't additive, and it converts gratitude into a decision the receiving system can actually staff.

Its failure modes cluster around what resists pricing. The benefits that matter most — goodwill, a relationship with a donor, strategic optionality — are the hardest to quantify, so a tidy net figure can lend false precision to a judgment that is mostly qualitative. Redundancy and displacement are routinely under-counted because they live in other people's calendars. And like any valuation it is easily run backwards — assembled to justify a decision already made rather than to test one. The discipline that keeps it honest is to score marginal contribution against the whole[1], carry the un-priceable factors as named uncertainties rather than dropping them, and let a genuinely uncertain result trigger a trial instead of a verdict.

How it implements the components

Contribution Net-Value Review realizes the evaluation-and-decision core of the archetype — the components that turn an offer into a judgment:

  • net_additivity_test — scores the offer for marginal, non-redundant value: what it adds to the whole net of what already exists.
  • full_coordination_cost_model — enumerates and sizes the lifetime cost the boundary hides: evaluate, integrate, supervise, comply, maintain, retire, and displace.
  • accept_reshape_redirect_defer_decline_rule — converts benefit-minus-full-cost into one of the five dispositions the appraisal acts on.

It does not run the reversible trial that resolves a "defer" (Bounded Contribution Pilot), secure the accountable owner and budget the "accept" requires (Sponsor-Required Acceptance Protocol), or write the working terms an accepted contribution runs under (Contribution Onboarding Packet).

Notes

The review recommends; it does not bind resources. A "yes" here is a value case, not a commitment — until a named owner accepts the coordination and lifecycle burden (Sponsor-Required Acceptance Protocol), an accepted-on-paper contribution is still an unfunded obligation. Keeping the value judgment separate from the ownership commitment is what stops a strong net-value score from quietly becoming work no one agreed to do.

References

[1] In cooperative game theory the Shapley value scores a participant by its average marginal contribution across the coalitions it could join — the value it adds beyond what the group already has, not its value in isolation. A net-additivity test applies the same instinct to intake: an offer earns credit for the gap it closes, and a duplicate of something you already run adds little however good it is on its own. ↩