Annual Report · Q1 2026
What moves voters, members, and donors, a synthesis of 500+ message tests across campaigns, unions, advocacy, and nonprofits.
The State of Persuasion 2026
What moves voters, members, and donors, a synthesis of 500+ message tests.
Grow Progress
What's inside
The full report digs into what the data actually says, not what campaigns assume.
Key findings
Messages grounded in dignity, respect, and inherent worth consistently beat messages focused on transactions, benefits, or incentives. The effect holds across age groups and across both member mobilization and donor persuasion contexts. Campaigns anchoring on what people deserve, rather than what they'll receive, generate significantly stronger movement.
The conventional wisdom says voters want to hear about upward mobility and opportunity. The data says otherwise, at least for the persuadable middle. Security framing (protecting what you have, stability, not being left behind) wins consistently with low-partisanship audiences. Opportunity framing tends to activate base voters without moving the persuadables campaigns actually need.
When audiences receive a pre-emptive "weakened" version of an expected attack, along with a brief rebuttal, that attack loses significant persuasive power when it actually lands. Grow Progress tested this across 14 studies in the 2025–2026 cycle. The effect is robust across partisan identities and holds even when the inoculation treatment is delivered several days before the attack exposure.
The top-line winner in a message test often masks dramatic differences underneath. In 42% of our studies, the subgroup that responds best to the winning message is also the subgroup least moved by a second message that performs strongly elsewhere. This means one-size-fits-all communication strategies are leaving significant persuasion on the table, especially across racial and generational lines.
Organizations that run message tests during the active campaign period, rather than only in pre-campaign planning, outperform peer organizations by a substantial margin. The ability to pivot messaging in response to new developments, shifting news cycles, and emerging opposition frames is a compounding advantage that builds throughout a campaign cycle.
By the numbers
Message performance
Average lift score across all qualifying tests in the 2024–2026 dataset, controlled for sector and audience type.
Testing gap
of campaigns in our dataset ran no message testing before their first major media spend.
"We can fix that."
Organizations that skip pre-cycle testing spend on messages that underperform by an average of 14 points compared to organizations that test before launch.
Method accuracy
When the predicted winner from each method was matched against RCT field outcomes, RCTs correctly identified the more persuasive message nearly twice as often.
500+ tests. 4 sectors. 2 years of data. Free to download.