Our Impact Areas for 2025

Governance

What we said we’d do

Our goal was to continue codifying our values and embedding our mission into our operational structure.

What we did

• Twenty Years of Mission-Led Growth: We marked two decades of using strategic design for the social sector, formalizing our purpose through our B Corp commitment.

• Navigating New Technology (AI): We co-created a human-centred AI policy through team workshops. The guiding principles position AI as a powerful assistant, not a replacement for our expertise, and focus on using its “democratising power” to reduce barriers for marginalized communities, while remaining mindful of bias. The policy is a “living document,” reviewed quarterly.

• Ethics as Standard (Fair Pitching): We formalized our ethical stance on fair pitching and procurement. This policy includes providing clear briefs, and in most cases, compensating organizations for any requested bespoke creative work to ensure a level playing field and respect for their time.

Plans for next year

Our continuous focus remains on governance, ensuring our founding ethos of balancing people, planet, and profit remains legally embedded in our structure forever.

Workers

What we said we’d do

The biggest risk in a remote-first model is a drop in connection and mental wellbeing, so our focus was on making our model truly people-first.

What we did

• Proactive Mental Health Support: We invested in Spill, an online therapy and coaching service, giving every team member immediate, confidential access to qualified therapists. We also introduced specific language and frameworks in one-to-ones to encourage vulnerability.

• Intentional Connection: We continued with regular, inclusive in-person retreats and encouraged simple rituals like “walk and talk” calls to create dedicated, non-work social time.

• Onboarding Buddy System: Every new hire is paired with a non-project “buddy” for their first six weeks to act as a cultural guide and ensure full integration.

• Lunch & Learns: These sessions were run to build psychological safety, inclusion, and equity. Topics included:

  • The COAST Tool: Introduced as a framework for effective feedback and conflict resolution (Connecting, Observing Facts, Asking Them, Sharing Impact, Taking Steps).

  • Inclusive Co-design: A deep dive into trauma-informed research, stressing the importance of safeguarding, clear informed consent, and ensuring participants see the impact of their time .

Plans for next year

We will continue to embed our inclusive and supportive practices into our project management toolkit and focus on maintaining our close, supportive feel as we scale.

Community

What we said we’d do

Our goal was to ensure everyone has access to formal training on diversity, equity, and inclusion to build capabilities for creating equality.

What we did

• Lunch & Learns: We successfully curated and delivered internal learning sessions on topics directly related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, such as Psychological Safety, Inclusive Innovation, and Trauma Informed Research Skills.

• Agencies for Good (AfG): We supported AfG in an ambitious new phase focused on equity and self-organising. Research showed that people from underrepresented groups were self-excluding from the space. We are helping to fund a new, compensated working group to co-design how the community can become more equitable and inclusive, moving beyond surface-level commitments.

Plans for next year

We will continue to support the AfG working group to ensure the community models the trust and equity we want to see in the sector, potentially testing new events like identity-led networking spaces.

Environment

What we said we’d do

We aimed to reduce the environmental impact of the digital products we build for clients, focusing on better monitoring of carbon reductions.

What we did

• Digital Carbon Reduction: By focusing intensely on lean design, efficient code, and performance optimisation, we build highly efficient digital services for our clients.

• Quantified Impact: Across four profiled projects, the work resulted in CO₂​ emitted per page view reductions ranging from 86% to a massive 98%.

• Annual Savings: This work equates to saving a cumulative 12,429kg of carbon emissions annually across the total traffic of those four websites.

Plans for next year

Our focus is on embedding website carbon tracking as a non-negotiable metric for every project’s success and exploring how recommended hosting solutions can drive down environmental impact even further.

Customers

What we said we’d do

We intended to monitor customer satisfaction formally, share it transparently, and set specific targets, particularly focusing on improving client digital skills.

What we did

• Client Recommendation: For the third year in a row, 100% of our surveyed clients would recommend William Joseph as a digital partner.

• Mission Alignment: We maintained a perfect 5.0 score for the statement: “The product the WJ team delivered will help us achieve our mission”.

• Strong Partnerships: We saw a significant increase, with 70% of our new business coming from existing clients (up from 30% in previous years).

• Accessibility & Inclusion: The score for making products “more accessible and will allow us to reach a more diverse audience than before” saw a significant jump from 3.6 to 4.7 over three years.

• New Accessibility Model: We developed and trialled new focused, diagnostic products to offer organizations expert analysis on single problems (like a homepage review or brand accessibility audit) without the commitment of a large, long-term project, making expertise more accessible to the sector .

Area for Growth

The score for “Our team have improved their capabilities in digital skills…” held steady at 3.0.

Plans for next year

We are actively focused on improving our ability to share skills and embed knowledge, exploring new ways to uplift our clients’ in-house teams more effectively to improve our “improved capabilities” score. We will also review our processes to address the slight dip in collaboration scores and maintain the supportive partnership feel as we scale.