2025: The Year of Big Listening
This great big year at Alpaca was about one thing: learning to listen better.
Happy Friday and Happy New Year, Alpaca!
Before we jump into our BIG new 2026 on Monday, I wanted to take a moment to look back on what made 2025 great, and what we’ve learned.
I think my favorite moment of our entire 2025 was when got on the phone with our customer Eric Filardi after their school signed the contract that took us over our long-held growth goal (you know what it is!). When I talked to Eric, he said this:
“I’m so excited to be part of your growth story. Teaching me how to better listen to my team has been a game changer for my work as an educator and a a leader.”
Meeting big goals is incredible. But meeting them alongside customers, investors, team members, and friends who see what we’re doing and where we’re going? That’s next level good.
2025 was Next Level Good.
So, what changed in 2025? I think this is the year we learned to listen better.
This year at Alpaca, listening showed up in new software, in new ideas for teacher recognition, in thousands of handwritten notes, in stories shared, and in the stories big and small that educators trusted us enough to tell.
I can’t believe how much we’ve learned from listening this year. Shall we take a look? Here are my highlights.
1. The new Alpaca Pulse helped us listen at scale.
This year, educators completed over 30,000 Pulse check-ins, selecting more than 85,000 sentiments to describe how they feel at work.
The two most common feelings they shared? Exhausted — and Committed.
That pairing says everything about the moment education is in — and why tools to both listen and support is the work we’re focused on delivering.
We also launched the Positivity Pulse, a measure of total positivity in a school building at any moment in time. In our first year with that tool, educators showed an average positivity score of 71% — and we’ll keep learning from that measure over time.
2. We asked one new question that helps leaders celebrate in new ways.
Listening to those sentiments has always been key to our work, but this year, we also started asking a simple but key question:
“What’s going well right now?”
We wanted to find the bright spots so leaders could celebrate them better. So far, we’ve collected 31,000+ Bright Spots, and here’s what educators told us what’s keeping them grounded:
Feeling anchored to purpose
Leaders who follow through
Trust to make decisions
Feedback that leads to real change
Communities that show up for one another
3. We got better at delivering on what teachers need.
We’ve always asked “What helps the most right now?” but this year, we built better ways to connect those needs to real action. This year, educators told us 28,000+ things they need, so their leaders could understand what support looks like right now. Then, we connected those needs to more than 250 actionable resources, available right in our dashboard.
Here are the top things they said:
Recognition in staff meetings
Opportunities to grow and share strategies
Small, weekly feel-good moments
Check-ins around impact and goals
Surprise treats that simply say, “We see you”
4. We had real, in-depth conversations with more than 1,000 school leaders.
This year, we launched the Little Wins Podcast, introducing us to some incredible school leaders doing extraordinary things to build school culture, little by little. I can’t tell you how many times I took my headphones off after a recording and said “You guys have to hear what this principal is doing.”
That happened everywhere — in the Podcast of course, but also at conferences, in sales and partnership conversations, and in the conversations we’ve had with our customers about how they’re using Alpaca and how they’re building culture in real time.
5. We fell in love with 23 educators when we hosted a summer camp for school culture.
You know how I felt about Camp Alpaca!
Our first ever conference/workshop for educators and culture leaders was a BIG experiment, it was so much work for our teams, and it was my favorite two weeks in the company’s history. Not just because of what our educators built (30+ school culture resources!? YES holy moly). Not just because we gained so much insight and feedback into our product, making it an even better launch for the fall. But above all, because listening to what teachers are looking for at work, and watching them take charge and build those creative ideas out to support their fellow teachers everywhere showed us all the genius of the profession.
6. Care You Can Hold: Packs
We cannot NOT mention the celebrations! Through Alpaca’s unique teacher celebration and recognition care packages, we delivered 27,000 Alpaca Packs into schools across the country.
Each one included:
One of our 23 custom products, designed and built just for educators, BY educators.
A handwritten thank-you note — 27,000 of them, written and delivered by educators, retired educators, community members, and friends all over.
Packs are simple by design, but powerful in practice. They turn appreciation into something tangible, timely, and human.
Alpaca’s care packages add a moment of celebration to the hard work of teaching, and a little bit of surprise to a school building each month. I love them, because they remind us to have a little fun, while listening to our teams.
7. Greater impact through listening
By year’s end, Alpaca supported more than 14,000 teachers and school staff members, across 120 district partners and 300 schools, 35 states and two countries, all with one simple idea: that when you listen to teachers, the world can change. That happened because of each of your hard work and support.
Thank You
WOW, y’all — we have a lot to be grateful for. Thank you, Alpaca team, for building with care, curiosity, and integrity — even when the work was complex and the path wasn’t obvious (and I was asking for just ONE MORE THING but on the same deadline).
Partners and investors, thank you for believing in Alpaca’s evolution, and for backing a long-term vision rooted in trust and impact.
And to the educators who invite us into their schools, stories, and signals every day: we’re grateful beyond words, but we’re going to keep telling you, in every way we can.
We’re ending the year more clear, more focused, and more committed than ever to helping schools become places where people feel seen, supported, and celebrated.
Onward — and thank you for being part of this journey.
With gratitude,
KB