2025 Grow Progress Wrapped: The Year in Persuasion
In 2025, Grow Progress powered millions of interviews and thousands of message tests. Here’s what the data (and the stories behind it) tell us about what actually broke through.
This year, our clients ran more tests, reached more audiences, and asked harder questions about what it takes to persuade in a crowded, skeptical media environment. We spent the year right alongside them: building, supporting, and analyzing thousands of experiments.
Don’t miss the 2025 Grow Progress Wrapped video—a snapshot of the testing, trends, and persuasion patterns we saw across the year. We are also energized to share how the year looked through numbers and more importantly, discover what they reveal about where persuasion may be headed next.
By the Numbers
This year, we powered:
- 1.9 million interviews
- 869 Rapid Message Tests, covering 3,496 individual messages tested
- 200 Audience Understanding Surveys
- 225 unique audiences, with the most frequently tested including US Adults, Moderate White women, and voters in Virginia
- 141 fully custom message tests, built to meet highly tailored client needs
Across all tests, the top issue areas in 2025 were:
- The Economy (24%)
- Environment (11%)
- Healthcare (11%)
- Public Safety (9%)
What Changed, and Why It Matters
When we compared testing patterns across 2024 and 2025, some clear shifts emerged. Testing related to reproductive rights declined by 5.8%, while organizations increasingly focused on:
- The Economy (+4.5%)
- Workers’ Rights (+4.3%)
- Public Health (+3.7%)
- Education (+3.2%)
- Immigration (+3.1%)
This mirrors the broader national conversation where affordability pressures, healthcare subsidies, and immigration policy debates dominated headlines throughout the year. Each of these issues were also front and center in many of the November 4th, 2025 elections.
But the how of persuasion audiences mattered just as much as that what.
The Persuasion Patterns That Broke Through
Across issue areas, the most effective messages shared a few consistent traits:
- Strong Storytelling: First-person and lived-experience narratives routinely outperformed abstract or institutional framing.
- Specific > Abstract: Messages that showed how a policy affects one person, one family, one paycheck resonated more than broad thematic appeals or sweeping rhetoric.
- Most Competitive Battleground? Attention: More clients came to us explicitly focused on whether or not their messages would break through at all, reflecting a crowded media environment and rising skepticism among audiences.
In other words, persuasion in 2025 wasn’t about just saying more, and saying it more often. It was about saying something human, concrete, and memorable, then proving it works before putting ad dollars behind it.
Looking Ahead
If 2025 taught us anything, it’s that movements and brands alike are becoming more strategic, more data-driven, and more honest about the challenges of persuasion in a noisy world, and we’re here for it. Testing isn’t just about optimization anymore. It’s about finding the stories that actually move people and having both the evidence and the gumption to stand behind them.
Here’s to making 2026 even harder to ignore.
