End-of-year newsletters usually follow a familiar format. Some blurbs about big accomplishments, a handful of eye-popping stats, and a cheerful proclamation that even greater success is just around the corner. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s the standard because it works! We wanted to try something a little different, though. Sometimes the slightly offbeat is more memorable than the perfectly optimized.
Congratulations on making it to the end of 2025. We’ve almost arrived at one of the loveliest times of the year: that beautiful week between Christmas and New Year’s when emails go unanswered and there’s not a Zoom meeting to be seen. Everyone can relax, take a deep breath, and quietly wonder if next year will be as weird as this one.
From what we can tell, the answer is probably “yes.” Most likely 2026 will be weird in some different ways, but the forces that defined the past year—the AIfication of everything, the Trump Administration’s crusade to reshape the world, the ultra-personalized emptiness of digital life—still seem to have a head of steam. When they’ll run out is anyone’s guess.
So here’s a prediction for the new year: people are going to start valuing a human touch a lot more.
People have read enough AI-written articles with the same grating voice and one-size-fits-all structure (bulleted lists are great for peppering your brain with data, but sometimes you just want to relax into a melodic paragraph). They’ve curated enough of their own feeds to realize that curating well—collecting tidbits that are satisfying and surprising and delightful—is harder than it seems. They’ve spent enough time in uncanny valleys to long for a place where everybody knows your name.
Conveying humanity isn’t a traditional goal for most organizations, at least not in the same sense as cultivating donors or driving sales. But in a social environment where trust is a scarce commodity, convincing people that you 1) are real flesh-and-blood humans who 2) aren’t just trying to milk them for profit is an enormously valuable differentiator.
Getting in on the ground floor of anything is rare, regardless of the context. But in 2026, savvy organizations have an opportunity to do exactly that—by positioning themselves as (genuinely) human-focused.
If that’s of interest to you, we hope you’ll get in touch. In the meantime, enjoy the holidays.
Take care,
Annmarie and Nick
