Our prize at the Polaris was for our successful project for Emmanuel Macron’s political movement En Marche !, for which we took a Gold award for Best Website in the category of Party: General Election. Not only we’re proud for winning a Gold award, as it’s the highest prize in the category, but also because we truly believe we set an unprecedented milestone in digital campaigning. Using NationBuilder’s Network solution, we created over 400 candidate websites in a matter of weeks. Given current political campaigns need to act fast and launch quickly, we believe think our work for En Marche ! is a good proof that this can be done swiftly without sacrificing quality.

Our recent Pollie win was for an entirely different project. At Tectonica, we pride ourselves on working with nationwide political campaigns as well as with local grassroots activists leading political movements that are as inspiring and transformative. That’s why we’re excited for our recognition in the category of of Website for Candidates at the Local/Regional/Municipal level for Steph for Schools, Stephanie Stephens’ campaign for David Douglas School Board in Portland, Oregon. 

As co-Founder of Oregon’s largest multicultural advocacy organization, Stephanie Stephens saw the serious impact of discrimination on her community. With the state facing a 1.5 billion dollar budget shortfall and Trump’s continuous scapegoating of marginalized communities, she knew that policy changes would disproportionately impact the immigrant and refugee children and youth of color that make up the majority of her school district. Anti-immigrant sentiment was being expressed by the school board, and these families needed a voice to represent them. As a Muslim woman, married to a Somali refugee with biracial children, Steph knew this first hand.

As a first time candidate lacking funding and a support base, Steph decided to start with a strong digital presence, so she reached out to us to create a website on NationBuilder. This acted as her digital campaign center, enabling her to manage events, donations, volunteers and email campaigning. Also, we worked with her to communicate her message and brand effectively, so we created a custom design that conveyed her values and loaded the site with content that told her personal story, focusing on her experience and personal connection to the district’s children as a mother.

Our efforts ended successfully -- despite her having no electoral experience and lack of resources, Steph handily won her campaign for school board utilizing a digital-based strategy. The 23-year incumbent bowed out, and a new challenger was defeated with her landslide victory of 76.58%. We’re extremely proud of having been part of her movement, and we’re as proud for being recognized by the American Association of Political Consultants for our role in it.