Oakley Capital Investment: digital-first sustainability reporting

The context

Oakley Capital is a leading private equity firm, partnering with ambitious founders and management teams to invest in outstanding mid-market businesses.

It actively monitors and steers sustainability performance across its portfolio of businesses, in addition to mitigating its own, relatively smaller, impacts.

As corporate reporting continues to digitise, Oakley Capital Investments (a listed PE trust) has been a leader, and Oakley Capital (the associated fund manager) also wanted to reflect this approach in its sustainability reporting.

The challenge

Oakley’s portfolio companies now report against the CSRD framework, beginning with a ‘double materiality’ exercise, which generated new data and content.

Of course, all of the associated work is only worthwhile if readers (and AI) can find it. Therefore, there was a clear incentive to shift to digital-first and provide more transparent, accessible and engaging reports for stakeholders.

We also wanted to make sure that we incorporated information from the 2024 digital-first report, using stats and insights from Google analytics to guide our attention and choices.

The solution

Reportl’s ‘native HTML’ approach brings digital-first to reporting design and production, with minimal change to the report creation process.

Oakley Capital and their specialist design agency, Friend Studio, used Reportl to collaborate on content, design and editing throughout. This report builds on the first, improving the content and user experience.

For the past two years, the report has been published simultaneously in both digital and PDF, as soon as it had received Board sign-off, with none of the usual online or PDF production delays.

Reportl’s unique digital-first, multi-channel process enabled all formats to be designed ‘natively’ in web format (HTML).

The benefits

This process efficiently delivers accessible, interactive online and PDF formats from one system, simultaneously. This is also ready for XBRL tagging (when required) using the relevant frameworks. 

Oakley’s report is responsive to all screen sizes, and retains its interactive, accessible features on all devices. (It is estimated that 75% of stakeholders rely solely on their mobile phone to access digital information.) 

Analytics data shows that ten times more users access an online report than download the PDF, but large increases in total engagement also show that the PDF and online versions are both vital to meeting stakeholders’ needs.