Winning the institutions

The starting point

The European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of the EU and the UK Parliament employ tens of thousands of people whose entire job is policy - and they were already among POLITICO's most engaged readers.

What hadn't caught up was the route in. Access to POLITICO Pro ran through individual logins and personal accounts, procurement sat in the way, and officials had no clear picture of what their institution already entitled them to. The demand was there; the way in wasn't.

That looked like a marketing problem. It was really a product marketing problem - the contract and the product experience had to change together before any campaign could do anything.

What I did

I led this programme. I helped redefine the institutional contract structure, then worked through it with engineering to rebuild the way these specific audiences arrive, sign up and get going: institutional domain detection in the sign-up flow, one-click sign-up from marketing emails, a landing page and onboarding built per institution, and newsletter sign-up blocks on politico.eu.

I scoped the product requirements, made the mocks, ran the campaigns that drove officials into them, and co-negotiated the contracts alongside our regional director. A better contract on its own would have moved nothing - it was the contract structure and the product experience deployments built to go with it, together.

The result

Full institutional access went live on 1 November 2025. Six months on:

Reach now runs from operational staff up through Heads of Unit, Directors General, MEPs and peers.

There is more below: how the contract and the product work fitted together, the results institution by institution, who we actually reached, and the pitch that landed.