Common Foundations

Essential practices are the pathway to impact measurement.

The Common Foundations provide guidance for how to measure impact. They are a minimum standard and social purpose organizations can know when their impact measurement practices are ‘good enough.’

Common Form

It’s possible to simplify funding and investing applications by asking the right questions.

The Common Form means that key organizational information and financial numbers can be entered once and used across the network. It makes it easier for social purpose organizations and funders and investors to communicate – and saves time.

Common Impact Data Standard

Computer science wizardry that makes the flexible standard possible.

You can think of the Common Impact Data Standard as an organization system for your impact data. It provides a place for everything so that everything can be in its place. This makes it easier to share and aggregate data. Softwares can be more easily designed to support better impact analysis. 

Common Framework

The world needs a flexible framework for social and environmental impact indicators.

The Common Framework is a way to loosely aggregate the dissimilar indicators used by social purpose organizations. Adopting a flexible standard would permit each organization to choose the measures it finds to be the most meaningful – while also allowing funders, investors, collaborators and networks to analyze the impact of their portfolio.

Community-Driven

Standards are communities, not documents.

Common Approach consists of four impact measurement standards created for – and governed by – social purpose organizations.