How to adopt the Common Approach Standards
If you are in a network of social purpose organizations and you’d like to try out the Common Approach Standards, here’s what you need to do.
Examine
Before you get started, it will be helpful to have a deep understanding of of your own current approach to impact measurement, and a preliminary understanding of each of the Common Approach’s four standards, and our guiding principles.
For the best experience adopting the Standards, we recommend that:
- You read, understand, and support our Guiding Principles.
- You review the Common Approach Standards and have a good understanding of each of them and how they fit together
- Your funders support—rather than dictate—your impact measurement approach. Need helping nudging them in this direction? See How Funders align.
- Your impact data is in a database of some kind. If you track your impact data in a CRM, case management software, survey software, or databases like Airtable, you’re likely already there.
- You are prepared to allocate staff time and resources to advance your data maturity and impact measurement practice as needed. This may be a light lift if your measurement approach and supporting software are already well-established.
Plan
Consider who is in your “network”. By “network,” we mean organizations that share—or want to share—impact data with each other. These may be organizations in a long-standing formal collaboration or an ad hoc collective forming around a new opportunity. Every organization in that network needs to meet some basic eligibility criteria.
- Every organization that wants to participate in sharing data needs to meet a minimum standard for impact measurement practice.
How to get there:
Take the Common Foundations self-assessment. See how your close organization’s impact measurement practices are to meeting this minimum standard, and make a plan to ensure you’re doing all five essential practices.
- Finding this difficult? Check out The Self-Assessement: Getting to 100%.
- If you say ‘yes’ to all the self-assessment questions, congratulations! You meet the standard and you do not need to choose new indicators, collect new data, or otherwise change your measurement practices.
- Each organization in the network needs to use software that aligns with the Common Impact Data Standard. Every organization does not need to use the same software.
- Already using software, but it isn’t aligned? Let your current software provider know you’d like them to be aligned! Make an <introduction to Common Approach, and we’ll help get them there!
- Open to using new or different software? Browse from the list of currently aligned software vendors for options that meet your needs.
A group of organizations sharing impact data does not need a shared theory of change or shared metrics or indicators.
Common Approach is supporting the impact measurement of the Government of Canada’s Social Finance Fund
Common Approach Guiding Principles, summarized
- Common Approach is shaped by all its users. Social purpose organizations that adopt the standard have input and decision-making roles in the standards’ ongoing evolution.
- We are committed to building impact measurement standards that place the power with operating charities, social-purpose businesses, and those they serve rather than focusing primarily on the impact measurement needs of foundations, grantmakers and impact investors.
Adopt
To be able to say, “our network has adopted the Common Approach Standards,” you need to complete the following:
| Standard | Minimum requirement to say you have adopted the Standard |
|---|---|
| Common Foundations |
|
| Common Impact Data Standard |
|
| Common Form |
|
| Common Framework |
|
Benefit
You will benefit from this as a network when:
- You have an understanding of how the organizations will share and use each other’s data (e.g. data privacy, data governance, data ethics)
- You are a network (not just a group) that has a reason to share data
- You are a network that can make decisions together
- Use data in ad hoc ways—we call these “messy roll-ups” (These are the phone calls in our telephone analogy!)
It’s like the invention of the telephone! Does anyone you want to talk to have a telephone too?
The full benefits of the Common Approach Standards are realized when the organizations sharing data with each other all use the Standards.
Common Approach is all about flexible, shareable impact data. When the others that you want to share data with—be that funders, government bodies, other social purpose organizations, or a network—are aligned, you will be able to see how it works for you.
Just like with the invention of the telephone: until there are other people with telephones who you wanted to talk to, it is neat to have but not yet as useful as it will eventually become!
