Our studio team breaks down how they turn impact metrics into works of art, customized for our clients.

by Phil Perkins and Chris Fanelli

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Many of our clients care about impact—aligning their portfolios with their vision of what they want to see in the world. But when impact is communicated as numbers on a page, it can be easy to lose the full scope of a portfolio’s ripple effect. That’s why our team embarked on a bold new approach to communicating impact—we call it immersive reporting. This uses cutting-edge 3D rendering technology (the same kind typically used for video games) to create custom videos that illustrate a portfolio’s impact. With immersive reporting, we can illustrate reduced clean water “ownership” by showing thousands of globules of water flooding a canyon,  or reduced air pollution “ownership” as thousands of balloons being released over a city. The technology allows us to do all of that, not just once, and at scale, customized by the firm or individual investor.

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This week, our Art Director Chris Fanelli and Technical Director Phil Perkins talk through the evolution of this technology, why we decided to invest in it, and how it serves our client base. 

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Why have we decided to invest in this at Ethic?

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Chris: Ethic’s sustainability team does an incredible job of making sense of the numbers and data behind Ethic’s impact models in the impact reporting we provide today. These impact reports already use equivalencies as a great way to provide context to those numbers in a way that is intuitive and makes sense to investors. Using the narrative and technical capabilities of Ethic’s in-house studio, we used those simple equivalencies to tell an even more immersive and visually engaging story of our clients’ investments in 2024. That was really our first project with our immersive reporting capabilities. 

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Phil: At Ethic, we help investors align their portfolios with their values by dynamically adjusting traditional indices. This shift naturally reduces exposure to certain companies, driving concrete impacts—like reduced ownership of emissions or pollution—that can be measured and visualized in meaningful ways. With immersive reporting, we’ve created a way to make those changes tangible. For advisors, it’s a powerful way to deepen client engagement by helping investors see and feel the impact of their investment decisions. It also offers a truly differentiated way to showcase a portfolio. Instead of relying solely on numbers, spreadsheets, or charts to tell a story, advisors can share visually compelling videos that bring a client’s impact to life in a whole new way. It’s something unique and valuable in the wealth management space—and it’s only possible when values are part of the investment equation.  

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How has our approach to immersive reporting evolved since we began tackling this?

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Chris: As we moved forward with the design process, our attention went from big picture questions, like what elements to represent, to more specific questions, like how we design an individual “unit” of water or air, or what environments provide the best context for what we’re trying to represent.

Phil: I think the biggest evolution for us involved dealing with the scale of the simulation. The range of input values that were possible for a given simulation was multiple orders of magnitude. These visualizations are dynamically produced using arbitrary inputs, and it was important to design scenarios that could support the input space properly, or, in the worst case, have the fewest possible scenarios to manage given a large spectrum of inputs.

In other software scenarios, you are generally thinking: does this function return the correct value or have the correct side effect for the entire input space? In our case, it’s that question plus: does it look good? Smart “T shirt” sizing of the input space worked well for us.

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What do you think immersive reporting adds to the client experience? 

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Chris: The reality of investing is that it has real world implications—both positive and negative. Clients who engage in impact investing aren’t just rearranging numbers; they’re customizing their investments to reshape their impact on the world they inhabit and pass on to future generations. A look back on the impacts of a year’s investments using elements as universal as water, air, and electricity is a great way to demonstrate impact in simple terms. 

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Phil: Viewing and reflecting on the performance of a portfolio is the constant concern of an investor. And today, more and more investors have an additional intention of changing the way their investments impact the world. It’s become a key part of their investment thesis. Being able to understand and visualize these quantities in realistic terms becomes fundamental to understanding the performance of a portfolio.

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How do you factor clients into your approach as you design? 

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Chris: It was important to me that the full story of each impact metric was clear at a glance. Though the data we’re using is complex, the concept really isn’t; investors avoided X gallons of wastewater associated with their portfolios by changing their investment priorities. 

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Can you talk about how you collaborate with the sustainability team?

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Phil: There are unbounded ways of expressing an impact metric into everyday physical equivalencies, but a vast majority of them are meaningless to a person or hard to relate to. We aspired to use equivalencies that are fundamentally digestible to an average viewer.

Ideation around an appropriate analog, and the calculation of arriving at the value, was critical to providing a true representation of a firm’s impact for the year. The sustainability team served as experts around our ledger of impact metrics and the process by which we transformed them. 

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Any final thoughts on the impact of this project on the values-aligned investing landscape?

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Chris: I hope this project encourages investors to zoom out and remember that their hard work has real purpose. Investing is emotional, and visualizing its impact has the potential to encourage investors to continue connecting the dots between their financials and the issues they care about.

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Phil: An investment solution that claims to be values-aligned should be supportable by real impact, real quantities. Our team’s ability to demonstrate this visually in a simple way is powerful, and should be the standard for managing portfolios with an investment thesis rooted in impact beyond basic indexing. 

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