2025 Publisher’s Report

2025 was a banner year for Convergence. We made major strides towards making our work more sustainable by leaning into very challenging political conditions and pivoting towards opportunity. This was not without risk, but we are well positioned to take full advantage of whatever comes our way in 2026.

Our team is now four full-time staff: a Publisher (focused on business, strategy, growth, and management–that’s me!); a Managing Editor (focused on written articles, content development, and wrangling our volunteer team–Akin, who joined in October); a Senior Multimedia Producer (focused on video and audio products–Josh); and a Publishing Operations Manager (focused on systems, processes, and making sure every article and episode looks amazing on the internet–Kimmie, who started full-time in July).

I want to share some of my big picture understanding about where we are as an organization. If 2024 was a year of translating learnings into programs, 2025 was a year of implementation, turning those programs into results.

Key Performance Indicators

Numbers aren’t everything and I’m not one to chase vanity metrics. But last year’s numbers were pretty stellar, so I’m going to brag a little here. For the purposes of this report, we’ll look at three major areas: traffic, subscribership, and membership growth.

Traffic & Audience

Our overall traffic grew by a whopping 86%. This is nearly double the percentage increase we saw in 2024. Do I think this can be sustained? No idea. Am I proud of it? Hell yeah.

With some new episode formats, tweaked growth strategies, and other means of utilizing our podcast feed for Block & Build, I’m optimistic we’ll continue this trend in 2026.

Membership Revenue

We increased our gross membership and individual donation volume from 2024 by 46.97%, not including offline donations (checks people mailed to our PO Box or fiscal sponsor). This is huge, and really thrilling as I’ve been trying to figure out how we do this work with greater independence from big philanthropy.

While we need the kind of capital investment offered by philanthropy to commit to major new costs like hiring, this growth in individual support indicates that we’re diversifying our revenue model. That will help us stay sustainable in the long run. Members and individual donors all showed up for us in a serious way this year, and we couldn’t be more grateful.

Infrastructure & Systems

This is my chance to shout out the stuff that many of you don’t see on the reader’s side: the systems that make all this work possible. In 2025, we made some major shifts that are going to allow us to grow into the publication and organization I have envisioned. This ranges from back office changes, like fiscal sponsorship, to project management upgrades, to changing how we manage contacts and send these newsletters. We’re on a growth trajectory and I’m really proud of that.

What It Costs to Run Convergence

Here’s how we spent our money in 2025. As I mentioned above, we increased our staff significantly, so I’m going to look at a month that reflects our new staffing configuration.

Far and away, our largest expense is on people. Last year we adopted a coherent and equitable pay scale policy that ensures that our pay differential is pretty flat. It’s important to me to do things that reflect our values, and paying our team fairly is one of those things.

Our expenses fit into one of three broad categories:

• Staffing costs, which include full-time, salaried staff; our hourly contractor, Mack, who helps me with the email program; and other freelancers, like our awesome web developers and the artists we worked with this year to make merch.
• Subscriptions to tech services (such as project management, web hosting, and collaboration tools) and fees related to banking and payment processing.
• General overhead, like accounting, legal services, printing, postage, our PO Box, supplies, and work-related travel.

Here are our expenses for November 2025.

General overhead increased over last year because we’ve started breaking the real costs of hosting the website out of our contractor fees for web development, as our website has started demanding more storage and computing power. On the other hand, nobody on the team was traveling in November, either, so that decreased our general spending for the month.

What’s Next?

2026 is already shaping up to be a year of great tumult. I can’t pretend to say I know what will happen next in the world, but here’s what we’re working on at Convergence:

• Continuing our most critical contribution: publishing articles, podcasts, and videos that help you better understand our world. This is the scaffolding upon which everything else rests, and even with new programs in the works, we’re maintaining a commitment to the publishing that brought you here in the first place.
• The 2026 Elbaum Resident Writers, our first writers-in-residence program, closes applications on February 15. I’m excited to make an investment in the future of our movement’s leaders as public thinkers!
• Headwaters, our new membership program for organizations. Just like for individual members, we wanted to create opportunities for movement organizations to be a part of Convergence, especially as we grow our efforts to make the Venn diagram of our readers, contributors, and direct supporters more of a perfect circle. (And if you’re part of an organization that uses Convergence’s publishing, I’d love to talk about how you can try Headwaters for free for the next few months!)
• The first full season of the Rad Ops Podcast, a show for people trying to run organizations that do as they say on equity and justice in an unjust world, drops this year. You might have seen the short “Ask RadOps” episodes that were released last year; more is coming soon from Sha and Yashna.

How Can I Help?

Glad you asked!

1. If you aren’t already, become a member at any level. You’ll get access to more behind-the-scenes content like this, as well as invitations to special events and other perks, all while knowing you’re sustaining movement media for the long haul.
2. Pitch us an article. We’re always looking to hear from organizers like you about what’s working, what you’re reflecting on, and advancing a dialogue about how we can better understand our historical moment.
3. Share a favorite article or interesting podcast episode with a friend or comrade. We still grow the most via word-of-mouth!
4. Tell us about what Convergence brings to your life and work. If you have some appreciation or reflection, please let us know! We’d love to hear what you like about what we’re doing. Also, don’t hesitate to leave a rating and review for Block & Build on your podcast app if you’re a listener.