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Programmers & Developers

​If you are building software to serve charities, nonprofits, social-purpose businesses, foundations, or impact investors, the Common Approach’s standards can help you develop better impact measurement tools for your users.

Aligning with the Common Approach standards will make impact data more interoperable and enable your clients to exchange and analyze impact data more easily.

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  • Common Impact Data Standard

    An ontology for organizing and sharing impact data that simplifies the exchange and aggregation of data across SPOs and funders, regardless of the impact models being used.

    What are the benefits of aligning your software with the Common Impact Data Standard?

    • enable the representation of precise definitions, thereby reducing the ambiguity of interpretation
    • foster data interoperability, i.e., the ability to understand and merge the information available from datasets spread across social purpose organizations, their networks and their investors and grantmakers
    • make the components of impact interpretable by a computer so that open-source software and other technologies developed for big data can be applied to analyze and interpret the data collected and generated by social purpose organizations
    • better enable data automation, including the detection of inconsistencies in data and detecting the causes of the observed variations

    The more impact measurement softwares align with the Common Impact Data Standard, the better it will become at allowing social purpose organizations who want to share their data and the linked details to do so at very little cost.

    Visit the Common Impact Data Standard repository on Github to learn more.

  • Common Framework

    A process for aggregating non-uniform metrics into coherence and insight in a way that is replicable, verifiable and transparent.

    *Coming soon* The Common Framework guide will provide useful background to software developers, which they can use to build Common Framework functionality into their application.

  • Common Foundations

    A minimum standard for the “how” of impact measurement. Five essential practices for useful, non-burdensome measurement.

    Common Foundations can be used as a guide to ensure your software supports the Common Foundations minimum standard for impact measurement. Including functionality to align your software with this standard will provide a value-add for users looking to ensure their impact measurement is “good enough”.

  • Common Form

    An ontology for organization and sharing non-impact data. It helps SPOs to cut down on retyping the same information over and over again for various different forms and reports.

    At this time, there is not a strong enough use-case for software programmers and developers to integrate into their tools. If you’re part of our community of aligned or aligning softwares, you will be among the first to know if this changes.

Common Approach provides support to any relevant software (for impact measurement or any other activities such as project management, customer relationship management, financial performance management, etc.) interested in aligning with our standards. Interested?

Contact us to discuss!