Standards
Common Framework
A standard for flexible aggregation
The Common Framework provides a transparent, replicable, and verifiable process for making sense of diverse, bottom-up impact metrics. 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. Its purpose is to enable credible portfolio-level insights while preserving the specificity and integrity of SPO-defined indicators.
What is the Common Framework?
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 portfolio managers to combine metrics that differ. This approach preserves the specificity of each organization’s context while still enabling meaningful, high-quality, portfolio-level insight.
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.
How does it work?
The Common Framework rests on three methodological pillars drawn from evaluation science, accounting, and data governance:
The Common Framework aggregates metrics that reflect the same underlying construct, even if the metrics are not identical. For example, “meals provided,” “households receiving food vouchers,” and “community garden participants” all contribute to the broader construct “access to nutritious food”.
The Common Framework’s flexible approach does not mean anything goes. A systematic and transparent set of rules define what can be included, excluded, converted, or aggregated.
Every aggregation is documented. Documentation enables: external review, replication, longitudinal consistency, investor trust and comparability across portfolios.
By working together and by continuously refining our shared practices, we can ensure that impact data serves everyone’s needs: the communities at the heart of social change to the investors fueling that change. A shared methodology for aggregation enables better decisions, greater accountability and more credible insights,ultimately driving better decisions and better outcomes for people and the planet.
The Common Framework process
The Common Framework does not do data aggregation for you. Rather, it provides the structure that makes those decisions explicit, consistent and verifiable. Decisions about the specifics of how data is aggregated remain the responsibility of the organization applying it.
Here’s how to use this structure:
Organize indicators under shared themes that reflect your impact priorities (e.g. fund strategy pillars, IRIS+ impact areas, SDG targets). This creates a conceptual structure for working with diverse bottom-up metrics and enables construct-based aggregation.
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.
Craft high-level indicators that summarize impact across a portfolio. Headline indicators group the metrics within a theme that have been harmonized to the same units. They summarize the portfolio’s impact performance by theme.
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.
Consolidate and document the principles, assumptions, boundaries, unit policies, and decision rules that governed aggregation. This step formalizes your methodology into a transparent, reviewable, and living set of aggregation policies that will evolve over time but must be applied consistently within each reporting cycle.
Use tables and visuals (pivot tables, bar charts, Sankey diagrams, time-series charts, etc.) to communicate findings, reveal patterns, and support learning and decision-making for different audiences.
Who is the Common Framework for?
The Common Framework will be used by impact practitioners who need to synthesize, interpret, and use diverse impact data. It is particularly relevant for:
- Impact investors who aggregate and interpret impact metrics from the companies they invest in.
- Grantmakers who aggregate metrics from charities and nonprofits to whom they have made grants.
- Network coordinators who aggregate data across member organizations with varied missions, and report to boards.
- Fund-of-funds managers who combine results reported by multiple intermediary funds into an overarching view.
Across these contexts, the Common Framework supports both accountability and learning. It enables users to communicate results clearly to boards, investors, and funders, while also identifying patterns, testing assumptions, and informing future decisions.
Whether you are working with ten organizations or hundreds, the same methodology applies.
The Common Framework complements Common Approach’s other standards
- Common Foundations helps to ensure the data that gets aggregated in the framework is of sufficient quality.
- Common Impact Data Standard simplifies the data pipeline and data cleaning aspects of data aggregation.
Together, these three standards create a coherent impact measurement ecosystem: essential impact measurement practices (Common Foundations), interoperability (Common Impact Data Standard) and aggregation methodology (Common Framework).
More on the Common Framework
Looking to explore further? Find other Common Framework information and materials on the Resources page.
