Counting Who Is in the Room: Inside a B Corp Agency's Inclusion Data

Most conversations about inclusion at work start with intention and end with a slogan. Far fewer start with a spreadsheet. That is what makes the equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) section of Kindred Agency's B Corp Impact Report 2025/26 worth reading closely. Kindred is a London purpose-led communications agency, and its report covers July 2025 to June 2026. It leaves some questions unanswered, but it puts real numbers on who works at the agency, how that has changed, and what the business plans to do next. For a private company with no shareholders to impress and no regulator forcing its hand on every metric, that is a deliberate act of disclosure.

This deep dive sets aside the report's other chapters, including governance, community and environment, and concentrates on one theme: how Kindred measures and manages inclusion inside its own team. Every figure below comes from the report itself, which Kindred published as a PDF in 2026. Where the report is silent, this article says so rather than filling the gap.

Why a B Corp report is a good place to look for EDI data

Kindred recertified as a B Corp in July 2025. The report states a verified B Corp score of 101.4, up from 100.4 in 2022. The qualifying minimum is 80, and the median for non-certified businesses is 50.9. The score is broken down into governance at 17.2, people at 38.7, community at 21.2, environment at 6.6 and clients at 17.6. People is the largest block by some distance, and EDI sits inside it alongside pay, wellbeing, career development and engagement.

The B Corp framework matters here because it forces a business to evidence its claims. A statement that an agency is inclusive does not score; a workforce breakdown, a policy, a programme and a result do. Kindred's own target is a 3% improvement in its overall score by the 2028 recertification, with environment named as the area where it intends to improve marks most. EDI is not the headline of that ambition, but the way the report handles it shows what a measured approach looks like inside a private company.

The report also arrives with an unusual feature. Kindred published a separate EDI report in the first quarter of 2026, and the B Corp report draws its workforce numbers from it. In other words, the agency treats EDI data as something worth its own publication cycle, and then folds it into the wider impact story rather than leaving it in a drawer.

The workforce, in the agency's own numbers

The headline figures are compact enough to take in at a glance. By gender, the agency is 73% female and 27% male. By ethnicity, 65% of staff are white, 11% mixed, 12% Asian and 12% Black. Eight percent identify as LGBTQ+, which the report describes as slightly above the national average. Eleven percent have a physical or mental disability, and 35% have a mental health condition. On education, 73% are state-school educated and 12% grammar-school educated, and the report adds that the agency has fewer privately educated staff than ever.

The report gives no headcount in this section, so the percentages cannot be translated into numbers of people, and it does not provide prior-year comparisons for every metric. Where it does, the movements are worth taking one at a time.

Gender: a 73% female agency

The gender split is the most lopsided figure in the report, and the report does not dress it up. The agency is 73% female and 27% male, and the report notes that the male share was 31% the year before. That means the share of men fell by four percentage points in a year.

The report offers no explanation for the skew, and this article does not guess at one. What matters is how a business responds to it. An agency with a majority-female workforce has a direct interest in the policies that shape women's working lives, and the People chapter is full of them: a Pregnancy Loss Policy introduced and published publicly, an equal wellness fund for expectant parents, hybrid working built around three remote-first days and two office-first days, and a matched pension. None of these are presented in the report as gender measures, but taken together they describe a workplace designed for people with caring responsibilities and unpredictable lives.

The fall in the male share is also a reminder that inclusion does not mean a single direction of travel. A diverse team is not one where every number moves the same way each year. The honest reading is that the agency's gender balance is lopsided, that it is moving slightly further from parity in one direction, and that the report offers no target to change it. A three-year EDI strategy, discussed below, is the natural place to decide whether that matters.

Ethnicity and a six-year baseline

The report calls the 2025/26 ethnic mix "our most diverse ethnic mix since we started tracking our data six years ago." That phrase carries two pieces of information. The first is that the mix is the most diverse the agency has recorded. The second, which is easier to miss, is that the agency has been tracking this data for six years. A single year's figure is a photograph; six years of figures are a trend line, and the ability to say "most diverse since we started" depends entirely on having kept the records.

The report does not publish prior-year ethnicity percentages, so a reader cannot calculate how large the change is. That is a limitation, and it is worth naming. The agency's claim is directional rather than quantified, and a reader should take it as such. What can be said with confidence is the current picture: roughly two-thirds of the team is white, with Asian and Black colleagues each making up 12% and mixed-heritage colleagues 11%.

The pipeline work in the community chapter points to how the agency tries to influence that mix. In 2024 Kindred launched an internship programme with Creative Access, a social enterprise that offers career-long access, opportunities, support and training to people from underrepresented backgrounds. The internship runs for six months and is paid at the London Living Wage, and a second intern joined last year. Kindred also gives talks to T-level students and teachers, and a T-level placement student joined the agency permanently as Finance and Admin Assistant in the summer of 2025. Several staff are members of Bloom, and one Account Executive joined the Bloom mentoring scheme.

The report also lists the networks it plans to strengthen: the Creative Mentor Network, the UK Black Comms Network and the Taylor Bennett Foundation, alongside continued support for Bloom and People Like Us. These are modest, specific commitments, and that is their strength. They are things an agency can plausibly deliver, and the next report can be checked against them.

Class and schooling: the quiet metric

Of all the data points in the report, the education figure is the one that most rewards attention. The share of state-school educated staff rose from 62% to 73% in a year, an increase of eleven percentage points. Another 12% are grammar-school educated, and the report says the agency has fewer privately educated staff than ever.

Social background is one of the less commonly reported dimensions of inclusion. It does not appear on most diversity dashboards, and it is harder to define and to ask about. Yet in creative and communications industries, where networks and unpaid early-career opportunities can decide who gets a foothold, school type is a meaningful signal. By tracking it, Kindred acknowledges that inclusion is not only about protected characteristics.

The financial structure of the People chapter supports this reading. The report describes pay bands that are benchmarked annually, with all employee pay sitting within them, and pay reviews twice a year, in October and March. The bottom of every pay band rose this year, and entry-level pay was adjusted for the London Living Wage rise. Kindred is a certified London Living Wage Employer, and 55% of employees received a pay rise, up from 48% the year before. An interest-free hardship loan scheme and the option of having January pay brought forward on request offer further practical support. These measures bear directly on who can afford to take an entry-level job in an expensive city, which is the real mechanism through which class shapes who gets into the industry.

Disability and mental health: 35% and the 88%

The disability and mental health numbers are the most striking in the EDI section. Eleven percent of the team have a physical or mental disability, and 35% have a mental health condition. Of those with a condition, 88% feel comfortable talking about it at work.

The second number deserves as much attention as the first. A high disclosure rate means little unless people feel safe making the disclosure, and the 88% figure suggests that, among those who have a condition, most do. The wider survey results, gathered in the first quarter of 2026, support the same picture: 88% of staff said Kindred takes mental health seriously, and 88% said they could talk to someone or ask for help.

The infrastructure behind these numbers is described in some detail. Kindhead is the agency's mental health programme. It includes Mental Health Action Plans and a Breathing Space Policy that offers up to ten consecutive paid working days in a crisis. The annual Wellness Fund rose from £150 to £250 per person, and 10% of the team is now trained as mental health first aiders, with one more planned. Other practices are smaller but telling, including a weekly Wellbeing Hour and a Deep Work Wednesday with no meetings in the afternoon.

Kindred plans to retain the Disability Confident Level 2 standard, but the report sets no target for the share of disabled staff. As with gender, the reader is left with a clear description of current practice and an open question about ambition.

Pay gaps: reported, but not printed

One of the most notable sentences in the EDI section is about transparency rather than outcomes. Kindred says it has submitted its gender and ethnicity pay gap data to the PRWeek annual report for the fifth year running, and that it was one of only 12 agencies to do so. The agency says it will resubmit next year and encourage others to do the same.

That is a real commitment, because voluntary pay gap reporting exposes a business to scrutiny that it could otherwise avoid. It is also where the report is least informative. The numbers themselves are not printed in the document, so a reader of the B Corp report cannot see the size of either gap. The data was submitted to PRWeek, but the impact report does not reproduce it.

The report demonstrates a habit of disclosure rather than an outcome. A reader who wants to know whether the gaps are narrowing will need to look beyond this document.

Engagement as evidence

The EDI numbers sit alongside engagement results that help show whether the policies are felt by staff. The January 2026 survey achieved 100% completion. In it, 96% of staff agreed that management shows appreciation for good work, up from 80%. Eighty-three percent said they feel they make a difference, up from 80%, and 96% said they are proud to tell others where they work, up from 95%. On transparency, 88% said management keeps them informed, up from 77%, and 88% said management is approachable.

Survey data inside a company's own report should always be read with some caution, because the company chooses what to publish. A 100% completion rate means every employee's view is captured, which is a strength, but the report does not say whether responses were anonymous. The year-on-year movements are the more useful signal. Several of them are upward and some are large, such as the rise from 77% to 88% in staff who feel informed. They suggest that the broader culture, the one in which people are asked to disclose personal information, has been getting more open rather than less.

Inclusion beyond the payroll: the client work

The report's clients chapter shows how the agency applies the same values outwards. Two campaigns stand out. Social Work England's Change the Script, in its third phase, aimed to show the breadth of the social work profession. It generated 107 media pieces, including eight national hits, and agreement that social workers improve people's lives rose 33%.

The second is Studio BlueGreen's Giant Armadillo, a Christmas number one bid fronted by Bob the Drag Queen to raise awareness of endangered species. A Manchester mural and partnerships with UK drag performers generated 2.4 million impressions. The agency's own assessment is candid: "Getting a Christmas number 1 wasn't the real marker of success though," it says, describing the goal as "using one underrepresented community to showcase another."

These examples matter to the EDI story because they show an agency whose staff and whose client work are meant to be consistent with each other. A communications firm that talks about underrepresented communities on behalf of clients faces an obvious question about its own composition. The report does not claim that its workforce data resolves that question, but it does show the agency choosing to be measurable on both sides.

What comes next

The forward-looking commitments in the EDI section are specific and short. Kindred plans to retain Disability Confident Level 2, relaunch its Culture Club, which subsidises group visits to galleries, exhibitions and cinemas, and publish an inclusive language guide to help staff communicate with or about minority groups. Most importantly, it will develop a new three-year EDI strategy towards the end of this year. That strategy will set new objectives, review progress to date and identify where to increase effort.

The strategy is the pivot point for everything above. Currently the report describes a pattern of tracking, publishing and programme-building. A three-year strategy is where tracking can turn into targets: whether to aim for a particular gender balance, how to set a goal for disability disclosure, what to do about ethnicity data that has so far been described in directional terms. If the agency publishes those objectives alongside the data, the 2026/27 report will be a far more demanding document, and that is the right direction for it to take.

What the numbers do not say

The limits are instructive. The report does not publish headcount, so percentages cannot be converted into people, and it does not print the pay gap figures it says it reports. It gives prior-year comparisons for gender and education but not for ethnicity, disability or sexual orientation. And it is a self-published document: the B Corp score is independently verified, but the EDI narrative is Kindred's own.

None of this undermines the report. It simply defines what kind of evidence it is. A fair summary is that Kindred has built a measurement habit, that several of the numbers are moving in encouraging directions, and that the next stage is converting measurement into commitments that can be held to account. That is a more modest claim than "we are inclusive", and a more credible one.

Why it matters

Most small businesses talk about inclusion. Few put numbers on the table. Kindred shares who works there, down to the share of staff with a mental health condition, and it has submitted its pay gap data for five years running. For a private company with no shareholder to answer to, that openness is a choice, and it is the kind of disclosure that makes B Corp claims credible. If inclusion cannot be measured, it cannot be managed, and it cannot be held to account.