WHEB Group

WHEB Asset Management has spent 16 years building something rare in the investment world: a reputation for authentic impact and genuine transparency. Their reporting has never been a compliance exercise. It's been a statement of intent, showing the work, not just describing it. When their 2024 General Report won an award for overall communications, it confirmed what many already knew. WHEB sets the pace for what impact reporting in sustainable finance can look like.

But winning awards wasn't the destination. WHEB wanted to lead the conversation on what comes next. With a recent acquisition by Foresight, they were navigating new terrain, staying true to their identity whilst beginning to align with a larger organisation. They came to us with a clear ambition: evolve their reporting into something more emotionally resonant, more interactive, and more honest about the complexity of a year that didn't follow a straight line.

2024 was a difficult year across the impact investment landscape. Progress rarely looked like linear success. It looked like holding course, adapting strategy, and learning in real time. The wider challenge, one that sits across the industry, is that most impact reporting still defaults to data first, narrative second. The numbers are there. The transparency is there. But the human story, the texture of what it actually feels like to do this work through uncertainty, often isn't. For WHEB, the question was how to honour the depth of their work without losing the rigour their stakeholders rely on.

We started with collaborative storytelling workshops alongside Managing Director Seb and Marketing Manager Susie. Together, we mapped the emotional arc of the year and agreed on a framing that felt true: this was a report about navigating complexity, not celebrating a tidy win.

From there, design followed narrative. Layout, pacing, and visual language were all shaped to create space for reflection alongside depth. WHEB's established data visualisation formats, trusted by long-term stakeholders, weren't overhauled. They were refined. Small adjustments in colour coding and structure brought cohesion without disrupting familiarity.

Their expansive colour palette, drawn from elements of nature, became a wayfinding tool. Each chapter had its own visual register, giving readers a sense of pace and continuity. Full-bleed nature photography, already a thread in WHEB's identity, was layered with subtle video backgrounds, still scenes that shift gently, echoing the ecosystems at the heart of their work.

We also helped translate WHEB's recently refined theory of change into a more intuitive diagram, one that visually anchors their role at the centre of systems change, wrapping around the WHEB logo itself.

Knowing that different readers come to a report differently, we designed for flexibility. An interactive summary page offers a quick overview with direct links to relevant sections. A sticky navigation bar, styled to mirror WHEB's own site, lets readers move freely throughout. For those who prefer offline reading, a fully interactive PDF download sits alongside the digital version.

The result is a report with real personality. Grounded in data, human in tone, and honest about what a complex year actually looked like. The WHEB team produced prose that added emotional texture to the numbers, something that, at the outset, felt counterintuitive, but quickly became the thing that made the whole piece land. Early responses have reflected what WHEB set out to achieve: a report that long-time stakeholders recognise as theirs, and curious new readers can find a way into.

As sustainability regulation tightens, from the UK's SDR to the EU's CSRD, impact reporting is moving from optional to essential for organisations of all sizes. WHEB's approach points towards something worth paying attention to. Reporting doesn't have to be a compliance task. It can be the clearest expression of what your organisation stands for, and how it thinks. For WHEB, this report is a foundation. As their identity continues to evolve within Foresight, the narrative architecture, the design system, and the storytelling approach built here gives them something to build on rather than rebuild from scratch.