What is the Common Impact Data Standard?
| Impact Dimension | Impact question each dimension seeks to answer | |
|---|---|---|
 |
What |
What outcome is occurring in the period? Is the outcome positive or negative? How important is the outcome to the people (or planet) experiencing them? |
 |
Who |
Who experiences the outcome? How underserved are the affected stakeholders in relation to the outcome? |
 |
How much | How much of the outcome is occurring – across scale, depth, and duration? |
|
Would this change likely have happened anyway? | |
 |
Risk | What is the risk to people and the planet that impact does not occur as expected? |
 |
How | What is the processes by which a Social Purpose Organization delivers Outcomes to its Stakeholders. |
The Common Impact Data Standard (CIDS) provides a core set of classes and properties that allow a social purpose organization to represent how they deliver outcomes to their stakeholders. The standard represents impact along six dimensions: what, who, how much, contribution and risk, and how, where the latter consolidates impact indicators for input, activity, output, and outcome. It is designed to be compatible with a variety of impact models in use by many social purpose organizations. As such, CIDS is compatible with an organization’s preferred impact model and associated measurements of impact. The standard is general enough to represent an organization's basic impact model and can also be specialized to capture a complex system of custom stakeholders, activities, outcomes, and measurements.
The Common Impact Data Standard enables social purpose organizations to create and share meaningful impact measurement data, forming a representation standardized across their platforms and departments. This avoids the unnecessary spending of time and money required to work with disparate systems. By adopting CIDS, organizations can store a variety of information in a consistent way, allowing for greater interoperability. Currently, there is a great deal of information that is left unused because it is not easy to access or organize. CIDS allows important data to be precisely and unambiguously represented and shared across an organization.
The Common Impact Data Standard also allows for greater integration with the external organizations by mapping to a single standard. Since the standard spans all variations of impact models, it makes it possible for social purpose organizations to share data amongst themselves regardless of the model variation they use. Such integration is possible whether only the core classes are used or a specialization that models local variations.
The Common Impact Data Standard is made up of a core ontology: a set of classes and properties stored as Linked Data in a graph database. The ontology captures semantic characteristics capable of describing a family of impact models, such as Logic Model, Logical Framework Analysis, Theory of Change, Outcome Chain, Impact Map and Outcomes Map. It is applicable to both businesses and nonprofit organizations. As a comprehensive representation of impact models, the ontology captures classes and properties required to store and process an organization's entire change model in a graph database.