Community-driven

Help us improve our data by taking the Common Foundations self-assessment!

We are looking to hear from social purpose organizations with well-established impact measurement practices!

At Common Approach, we believe that standards need to be flexible and meet people where they are at. By ensuring we are hearing from organizations at varying stages of doing impact measurement, we can make sure that the Common Foundations continue to provide useful guidelines that will evolve to reflect the community.

The Common Foundations set a minimum standard for the “how” of impact measurement in five essential practices. These essential practices are outlined in our self-assessment tool, which allows social purpose organizations to quickly and easily verify whether or not their impact measurement practice meets the Common Foundations standard by answering a series of “yes” or “no” questions.

The data gathered by the self-assessment will also help Common Approach and our partners at Carleton University to assess if the Common Foundations Version 2.0 does indeed “meet people where they are at”.

By completing the self-assessment, you’ll be helping us to gather more well-rounded data. You’ll also receive resources to improve your impact measurement or templates to share that you have verified that your impact measurement meets the Common Foundations standard. This verification can be used on your website, on social media, or in your impact reporting.

The survey takes an average of 10-12 minutes to complete. If you’d like to view all the questions before beginning, you can use this worksheet to prepare (though this is not necessary).

We are eager to hear not only from social purpose organizations in the beginning stages of implementing impact measurement but also from those with an established practice.

Preliminary data gathered shows that question-by-question (or sub-practice by sub-practice), our goal of setting a standard that 60% of social purpose organizations can meet is being met. However, overall scores of 100% fall below the 60% target.

A series of pie charts indicating that most questions in the self-assessment receive a majority of "yes" responses.

If responses from organizations with well-established impact measurement practices change these results, we will focus on more systematic sampling; if not, we will look at the content of the Common Foundations.

With more responses from a broader set of organizations, will also get a clearer picture of which sub-practices of the Common Foundations are receiving the most “no” responses. This will provide useful information for our governance groups and technical committees to reference in continuing to evolve the Common Foundations standard, and in determining future projects and priorities for the Common Approach.

At Common Approach, we believe that impact measurement can be improved by making it more relevant to social purpose organizations. This means hearing from social purpose organizations! In addition to taking the self-assessment, make sure you don’t miss opportunities to add your voice to our work by signing up for our newsletter below and following us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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