2026-11-04 –, Room 1
What happens when Mautic stops being a marketing automation platform and becomes part of the infrastructure of a political movement?
In 2024, Hungary's newly emerging TISZA movement needed to turn a rapidly growing audience into an organized community. Mautic became much more than an email tool: it evolved into a CRM for supporters and helped provide the digital foundation for organizing the grassroots TISZA Islands across the country.
This talk tells the story of how an open-source marketing platform was pushed far beyond a conventional marketing use case — managing audiences, communication, segmentation and community organization while retaining control over the infrastructure and data, without per-contact or per-user software licensing.
I'll share what worked, what didn't, what we had to build around Mautic, and how lessons from this system helped shape the thinking behind the digital infrastructure that followed.
It is a story about Mautic at unusual scale, but also about something bigger: what becomes possible when an organization owns its technology instead of renting access to its audience.
A real-world case study covering the technical and organizational evolution of Mautic inside one of Europe's fastest-growing political movements.
The session will cover the architecture and workflows behind audience management, segmentation, supporter communication and the organization of local TISZA Island communities; the advantages and challenges of using open-source infrastructure; data ownership and avoiding per-contact licensing; scaling under extremely rapid growth; and the limits we encountered when stretching Mautic beyond traditional marketing automation.
I'll also discuss how the experience influenced later digital tools created for the movement and what Mautic developers, agencies and large organizations can learn from the project.
This won't be a political presentation. It will be an inside technical story about what happens when Mautic becomes mission-critical organizational infrastructure.
Joey Keller is CTO at Friendly, a Mautic professional, speaker and content creator who enjoys finding out just how far Mautic can be pushed. His work spans marketing automation, email deliverability and infrastructure, from everyday campaigns to large-scale and unconventional Mautic implementations. He regularly shares what he learns with the Mautic community through talks and his YouTube channel.