Reporting Relies on Relationships

By Katerina Nieboer, Impact Reporting Associate

November 2025 

I joined Rally Assets at the beginning of 2025, bringing a background in ESG ratings and a curiosity about how portfolios can drive systemic change. Working to deliver impact reporting for our client portfolios this year has made me reflect on how relationships drive not just systemic change but the reporting of it. As we publish an impact overview of Rally Funds, I thought it was timely to share some of those reflections.

Relationships with Internal Teams
The impact reports are a product of collaboration. They combine insights from the research, impact management, reporting and communications teams, alongside portfolio managers, to build a full picture of the impact a product and a portfolio is having. The collaboration starts at the beginning, with extensive product origination and due diligence influenced by what we know we’ll later need and want to report on. So while impact reports happen long after investment, we need to have good relationships across the teams from the earliest stages of portfolio construction.

Those relationships are key when impact results start to come in; the research team offers a deep understanding to help me contextualize the results. Impact reporting is still varied. Each private product issuer and public company has its own context and data quality, which means spending time understanding the details before drawing conclusions. Luckily, there is growing standardization regarding impact measurement and reporting, and the impact management team’s guidance regarding measuring and reporting norms is important in shaping our reports.

Relationships with Product Issuers and Companies
For RTIF’s private products, we work closely with fund managers to first understand what data points are most meaningful to their impact intention, and then monitor progess through regular check-ins. These ongoing touchpoints help us receive stronger, more consistent data while building the relationships that make good reporting possible. In turn, this allows us to provide investors and clients with a more accurate picture of fund impact and  portfolio-level impact.

Data Relationships
The messy relationships are sometimes found with data relationships! The relationship between metrics and key performance indicators; between company activities and SDG contributions; between activities and their contribution towards the larger outcomes we’re striving to support in a portfolio. (For Rally Funds, you can read about the Rally themes —  Addressing Climate Change, Sustainably Meeting Basic Needs, Preserving and Restoring Natural Capital, and Advancing Social Equity — and their 20 target outcomes.) Making those strong clear relationships enables us to show how each product contributes to these themes, allowing the data to tell a meaningful story for investors.

After all the nitty-gritty work, seeing the big-picture results and the real-world impact associated with investments is rewarding. For instance, Rally Funds underlying investments provided over 16 million people with water, sanitation and hygiene services. And they contribute to all 17 SDGs, demonstrating a reinforcing, holistic nature of our investment approach.

Multi-Dimensional

These layers of relationships, with internal teams, fund managers, companies and the data itself, strengthen our ability to share impact results with fund unitholders and clients. They remind me that meaningful impact reporting is never one-dimensional. It comes from collaboration, shared understanding and continually improving how we communicate impact.

In the end, the full picture is bigger than the sum of its parts. Impact goes beyond the raw numbers, and when everything comes together, it reveals a deeper and more complete story of the change being created.