“These grant recipients bring a range of innovative perspectives on how to address data gaps and advance best practices in the collection and evaluation of impact data,” said Jessie Duncan, Program Officer at the TPF. “Each organization shares the goal of generating more consistent and interpretable impact data that can be used by different market actors to improve decision-making and better address urgent sustainability challenges.”
Common Approach is thrilled to be receiving a grant from The Tipping Point Fund on Impact Investing (TPF). TPF recently announced grants would be awarded to 16 “organizations [that] are working on a range of projects related to improving best practices for impact metrics and measurement and advancing the data infrastructure that is needed to scale the impact investing field with integrity.”
This recognition of Common Approach’s role in improving data, metrics and measurement—one of TPF’s two core grant-making priority areas—will support our continued work in developing and promoting impact measurement standards that support flexible, sharable data.
Central to this work is our Common Impact Data Standard, which is currently the only free, public impact ontology. It is also the most widely used, with nine softwares currently aligned or in the process of aligning, including several that are available for public use.
The Common Impact Data Standard was initially developed with Mark Fox at the Centre for Social Services Engineering at the University of Toronto, in consultation with experts and in alignment with other standards. It continues to be shepherded by our Technical Committee, who, in addition to providing their technical knowledge, have assisted the Common Approach secretariat in developing our first public review, which concluded at the end of 2022.
We are extremely grateful to technical committee members Carly Bogen, Mark Fox, Alex Goen, Dan Lammot and Jaclene Roshan and to each person who attended our Common Impact Data Standard public launch events or submitted feedback. Common Approach is committed to the community-driven development of our standards via multi-stakeholder participation that is inclusive, diverse, equitable, and accessible.
Be sure to read The Tipping Point Fund’s full announcement to learn more about their work in supporting the impact investing market and about the other organizations working in this space whose work they are also supporting!
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