We are proud to share that we earned six Reed Awards for work powered by our platform in partnership with our clients.
Named for Campaigns & Elections founder Stanley Foster Reed, The Reed Awards embody excellence in political campaigning and grassroots & advocacy. They are considered “The Most Exacting Award in Political Campaigning.”
What matters most is not the count - it is what these wins say about how campaigns can use texting to win when time is short, budgets are tight and traditional outreach leaves gaps.
Each of these campaigns faced a problem that could not be solved by doing more of the same traditional tactics:
In Castle Pines, thousands of voters lived in gated neighborhoods and secured apartments.
In Gulf Shores, a first-time candidate needed name recognition and funds against an incumbent.
In New Hampshire, turnout and persuasion had to happen in low-attention municipal races where a few dozen votes often decide the outcome.
In New Jersey, a conservative gubernatorial candidate needed to boost the efficacy of traditional tactics with texting to make every vote count in an underdog race.
In each case, texting became the channel that closed the gaps. Not as an afterthought, but as the infrastructure that helped the campaign move faster, stay more precise and build real two-way voter contact.
Here is how it came together.
🏆 Best Use of Mobile to Support a Field Program
🏆 Best Use of Mobile Targeting - Republican
Castle Pines is the kind of town that exposes every weakness in a traditional field plan. Roughly 30% of households sit behind gated communities, and another 5% behind secured apartment buildings. So in practical terms, about 35% of voters were functionally unreachable by door knocking. In a city with about 12,000 registered voters and an all-mail election, that kind of disparity matters, especially because the previous mayoral race our client, Tracy Engerman, faced was decided by 22 votes.
With three months to win a three-way race, she had no room for wasted time or resources. In addition, she had no campaign manager. She needed to replace locked doors with direct, two-way virtual voter contact and run the program with the discipline of a much larger operation.
Tracy turned to our platform for texting and ran the program 100% by herself. With step-by-step 10DLC guidance from our registration team, support from our complimentary Messaging Strategists and our Texting to Win resources, she built a texting operation that behaved more like a campaign CRM than a simple send tool.
Inside the platform, Tracy built six micro-universes by geography, age, gender and affiliation. She ran A/B tests, tagged contacts by response and segmented follow-up lists on the fly. Because that work stayed inside one system, she did not need to keep exporting spreadsheets, making manual edits and reimporting new universes every time the plan changed.
The message calendar followed the election itself. Early texts introduced Tracy and highlighted her accomplishments. Mid-campaign texts shifted into persuasion tailored to each segment. As ballot deadlines approached, the program moved into ballot chase mode based on known return patterns.
The text program did not try to win with flashy creative. It won by sounding human - short, plain-text messages felt like a neighbor reaching out, not an ad. That lowered friction, increased replies and turned two-way conversations into action.
Supporters were asked directly for vote commitments. Confirmed backers were tagged. Yard signs became another touchpoint. Then Tracy used those same supporters to nudge neighbors whose ballots were still sitting on kitchen counters.
Timing mattered just as much as targeting. Texts were coordinated with mail and pushed before fall break, when local attention often disappears for more than a week. In apartment communities that many field plans undervalue, she even gamified turnout by pitting complexes against one another, giving renters a reason to see their vote as part of a local contest worth winning.
Tracy sent roughly 11,000 texts for a total cost of just $636.81. The text program helped deliver 2,650 votes toward a 2,700-vote goal and won 44% of the vote in a three-way race, ahead of challengers at 32% and 24%. It is also notable that Tracy was working with a budget of about $6,500 ($5,969) raised, while a leading opponent raised $29,045. That is what it looks like when you turn an inaccessible map into direct voter contact.
🏆 Best Text Creative/Copy - County, Local or Judicial Campaign - Republican
Local races are usually won on familiarity. That made our client Jennifer Gunthrie’s bid for Gulf Shores City Council a steep climb.
Not only was she a first-time city council candidate, but she was also completely new to politics, facing a 9-year incumbent and a long-standing council bloc, some of whom had been in office for more than 20 years. As one of only two women in the race, she also carried a personal mission: to show her daughters and her community that local leadership can look different.
She had to solve two problems fast. First, she needed to introduce herself beyond her personal network, including to voters who looked more like her opponent on paper. Second, she needed to motivate younger residents who often sit out municipal politics.
Jennifer decided to make texting her campaign’s starting point for voter contact, which evolved into making it her ONLY communication hub.
Before the first message went out, our team walked her through 10DLC registration step by step. Then, using our Texting to Win Playbook and Messaging Strategist guidance, she expertly mapped a content calendar that matched the pace of the race despite her lack of familiarity with a standard election calendar and proper outreach cadence: introductions early, community touchpoints in the middle and a closing push built to convert goodwill into ballots.
She ran two parallel audiences. A personal list powered kickoff invitations and fundraising follow-ups. A voter list handled early name recognition and persuasion. Geographic segmentation let her invite people to meet-and-greets in their own neighborhoods, which made each ask feel local and relevant.
Because every text could be answered, she could do far more than broadcast. She answered questions, scheduled face-to-face conversations, coordinated volunteers - keeping the tone neighbor-to-neighbor throughout. The texting program scaled the intimacy local campaigns need without losing the human feel voters respond to.
Texting let the campaign build familiarity quickly and at scale. That mattered in a race where incumbency usually carries the day. It also supported small-dollar fundraising in a way that aligned with Jennifer’s brand: personal, direct and community-first.
The numbers show how that approach resonated. She became the top fundraiser among all council candidates and finished second only to the mayor overall, raising roughly $15,000 from 120 donations. The average gift was $190. Eighty-two donations were $100 or less. 65% came from Gulf Shores residents, and another 20% from nearby business owners and community organizations. In other words, 85% of the money came from people who either lived in Gulf Shores or had a direct stake in it.
Jennifer won 70.43% of the vote and unseated the 9-year incumbent, outperforming surrounding municipal contests where most races finished in the 45% to 55% range. The result was decisive, but the image that had a lasting impact on many is more personal. On election night, she arrived late at the official city leader election watch party, with wet hair, in a white T-shirt and jeans, holding a Styrofoam cup. There was no polished incumbent machine behind her. There was a first-time candidate who used direct conversations to build trust and turn a local race into a landslide.
🏆Best Use of Technology for GOTV - Republican
🏆Best Use of Mobile - Northeast & Southeast
New Hampshire municipal elections are turnout traps. They are low-attention contests in which a few dozen votes can decide the outcome. Our partner, Grand Old Victory LLC, is a full-service political texting firm that pairs cost-effective voter outreach with advanced analytics. Working on behalf of the New Hampshire Republican State Committee, they set out to prove that a modern, disciplined texting operation could move those margins in a municipal year.
The plan had two objectives. In Laconia, the goal was to lift turnout in an open-seat mayoral race. In Manchester, the goal was to run a persuasion-forward program that could help secure the narrative in the state’s largest city.
The team needed a texting platform that behaved like a campaign CRM, not a one-and-done blast tool, and they found it in ours. Built-in short links with click tracking made voting information links trustworthy and measurable. Tags, filters and segmentation made it easy to follow up based on who clicked, who replied and what they said, without the slow cycle of exporting and reimporting lists.
Our 10DLC registration team handled carrier registration details, and our Messaging Strategists helped refine CTAs and opening lines so messages felt local from the first glance through the whole message. With roughly $15,000 in total spend, texting became the team’s primary scalable voter-contact channel - they treated texting as core infrastructure, not a last-minute add-on.
What made this texting program stand out was not volume alone. It was the feedback loop:
That kind of interaction changes what a municipal program can do. In Laconia, texting supported turnout where every ballot mattered. In Manchester, it paired civic reminders with leadership messaging, making persuasion practical at scale. The team did not have to choose between local tone and operational discipline. It had both.
In Laconia, turnout rose from 13% in the comparable 2023 cycle to 29% in 2025, a 16-point increase, and the open-seat mayoral race was decided by just 55 votes. In Manchester, Mayor Jay Ruais improved from a 2.66% win margin in 2023 to about 18% in 2025, while the program also helped protect nearly the entire slate of incumbent aldermen.
This was not texting as an accessory. It was texting as the backbone of municipal persuasion and GOTV.
Alongside these five Reed Award wins spearheaded by our team with the help of these three wonderful clients, Campaign Engine also submitted a winning entry in the Best Use of Targeting to Support Vote-by-Mail Effort category, which credited us as part of the entry. That matters because it reflects the kind of relationships we value most - being partners in our client’s success.
We have been partners in success with Campaign Engine for multiple years, winning 9 total industry awards together. Over that time, we have supported programs that required strong targeting, with an execution layer that was fast, compliant and easy to act on. When a team continues to build with you across cycles, it says something simple: the work done together holds up when the stakes are real.
These kinds of partnerships, with systems and people that teams trust enough to bring into the next race and next cycle, are how better campaigns and campaign technology get built.
These six Reed Awards reflect more than strong creative or useful features. They show what happens when campaigns and organizations can replace friction with direct conversation.
That is the standard we build and upgrade our platform for every day. If you need direct voter contact that can move at the speed of the calendar, stay precise under pressure and hold up in real campaign conditions, these wins show that the right texting infrastructure and strategy can turn real conversations into victory on election day.