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The Common Framework provides a transparent, replicable, and verifiable process for making sense of diverse impact metrics. And it’s free to use!
Purpose-driven organizations measure impact in unique ways making aggregation difficult. The Common Framework is a method for aggregating diverse metrics into meaningful insights—all while preserving their original context.
The Common Framework is used by impact practitioners who need to synthesize, interpret, and use diverse impact data. It is particularly relevant for:
Impact investors who aggregate and compare impact metrics across their investments, including public and private equity, debt, and real assets.
Grantmakers who aggregate metrics from charities and non-profits they fund.
Network coordinators and syndicated non-profits who aggregate data across member organizations with varied missions.
Fund-of-funds managers, asset owners, and limited partners, who combine results reported by multiple intermediary funds into an overarching view.
Multi-service charities who must aggregate the results of diverse programs into a coherent account of the organization’s performance.
[The Common Framework] addresses one of if not the hardest challenge that exists in our field. 13 years in this game and no one has yet cracked the top-down bottom-up conundrum! This could be it!
The Common Framework is being used by fund-of-funds, multi-fund portfolios, in venture capital, and community lending.
Funders often receive a muddle of metrics. This may be because they are collecting data from public sources like annual reports, or because they choose not to burden their investees or grantees with rigid reporting requirements. This leaves them unable to effectively benchmark performance, identify trends, or report collective results.
The Common Framework solves this problem by providing a consistent methodology to organize, harmonize and aggregate diverse metrics into meaningful insights at different levels of analysis, while preserving the context and relevance of the original information. It is the perfect bridge between bottom-up and top-down metrics.
The Common Framework enables portfolio-level impact performance analysis by making similar, but not identical, measurements comparable. It advances the comparability that rigid measurement standards have failed to achieve by preserving flexibility, setting clear boundaries and making the basis for comparison transparent.
The Common Framework Part 4: Practical Guidance provides a step-by-step guide to implementation:
Organize metrics under shared themes that reflect your impact priorities (e.g. fund strategy pillars, IRIS+ impact areas, SDG targets). This connects diverse bottom-up data so you can easily synthesize and make sense of portfolio performance.
Convert and transform diverse measures into a small set of common units (e.g., people, dollars, hours, emissions). This ensures that otherwise incomparable indicators can be aggregated.
Headline indicators are the high-level summaries of groups of bottom-up metrics. They summarize the portfolio’s impact performance by theme.
Headline indicators form the foundation for portfolio reporting, enabling transparency, comparability, and alignment with global impact reporting frameworks.
Roll up harmonized metrics into portfolio-level results for each headline indicator. Validate the aggregation by checking inclusion and exclusion integrity, internal consistency, time alignment, reasonableness, and traceability back to source data. Aggregation is where the analytical preparation of the previous steps becomes operational.
Consolidate and document all of the decisions you have been making: the principles, assumptions, boundaries, unit policies, and rules that governed aggregation. Formalizing your methodology into a transparent, reviewable, and living set of aggregation policies is essential for transparency, replicability, and verifiability. The policies will evolve over time but must be applied consistently within each reporting cycle.
Browse our collection of guides, helpful tools, and practical examples from other practitioners.
Additionally, Common Approach is offering Common Framework office hours to discuss questions, challenges, and possible next steps.
Practitioners are encouraged to use the Common Framework, share their experiences and contribute to its ongoing development.
The Common Framework does not attempt to standardize metrics. Instead, it standardizes how decisions about aggregation are made and documented. It provides a clear and documented way for practitioners to combine metrics that differ. This approach preserves the specificity of each organization’s context while still enabling meaningful, high-quality insights at different levels of aggregation.
Like any shared practice, the Common Framework is evolving. Each application improves it: refining how themes are defined, how assumptions are documented, how conversions and exclusions are handled, clarifying boundaries of aggregation. When something doesn’t work, it is adapted. When something works, it becomes part of what is “common enough.” That is how this methodology becomes truly common—not because it is perfect, but because it is usable, auditable, and built to improve over time.
A methodology for aggregating diverse metrics.
A uniform set of metrics.
A transparent, replicable and verifiable process that results in a reasonable aggregation. Guardrails against overclaiming and double counting.
A road map to the sole correct aggregation of data. Experts might aggregate the same data differently. There are many reasonable aggregations.
The Common Framework is built on years of research, testing and consultation: Common Framework has been carefully tested with impact measurement practitioners, investors, funders and networks. Read more about how the framework was developed.
Common Framework will expand and evolve over time. As the Framework is applied across more contexts, Common Approach will continue developing guidance, testing new applications and addressing more complex aggregation questions. Read more about how the framework will evolve.
