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The Common Framework helps portfolio managers make sense of diverse, bottom-up impact data.
Rather than prescribing what organizations should measure, it offers a structured way to organize, convert, combine, and communicate metrics that arise from different contexts, sectors, and methodological traditions.
This year, Common Approach will be releasing a Version 1.0 guide to the Common Framework.
The Common Framework guide has two parts: the first outlines the framework’s theoretical foundations, including how we approach transparency, replicability, and verifiability while preserving context; the second translates these foundations into a practical, step-by-step process that managers can realistically follow to implement the framework.
In the Spring, an exposure draft of Version 1.0 of the Common Framework guide will be made available. Our goal is to ensure the development of the guide is open, transparent, with lots of opportunity for input from the sector.
A broader and more formal consultation phase is planned for September 2026, once the guide has been tested more extensively in real-world settings by organizations implementing it directly, rather than through Common Approach–led support.
“[This] addresses one of if not the hardest challenge that exists in our field… no one has yet cracked the top-down bottom-up conundrum! This could be it!”
“…a strong and well-structured introduction to the Common Framework [that] clearly explains the background thinking alongside the practical steps taken and they both do a great job of laying out the foundational logic in a way that is easy to follow.”
“The Common Framework fosters comparability: transparent aggregation logic, harmonized units, bounded discretion, and replicable documentation.”
