En Marche digital strategy for the 2017 presidential campaign: 400K+ members, 2,000 events/week, web infrastructure stood up in a matter of months.
Launching a political movement in April 2016 and winning the presidential election a year later isn't done with posters. En Marche was built as a digital-first organisation: a website, a member database, mobilization tools. Membership was free, online, in a few clicks — that was the bet. By the finish, the party claimed close to 400,000 members after the 2017 presidential election (public LREM figure). *Public context (not attributed to PMF)*: the Grande Marche, a door-to-door operation run in summer 2016 by around 25,000 En Marche volunteers, fed the platform with field data and citizen verbatims, then exploited by the campaign team with support from Liegey Muller Pons (Le Monde, NDI Movement-Based Parties).
Build, in a few months, the digital infrastructure of a political movement that didn't exist — capable of absorbing hundreds of thousands of members, coordinating thousands of events all across France, and holding the pace of a presidential campaign. No party, no history, no file — everything had to be stood up from scratch.
A political organisation born of a website. En Marche showed it was possible, in a few months, to build a digital infrastructure capable of rivalling parties installed for fifty years — and that, in politics, digital isn't a communications channel but an organising tool. The platform served as the backbone of the movement well beyond the election. No digital town halls, no gimmicks: a tool to sign up, a tool to gather, a tool to talk to people. The rest is politics.