Echo Canyon Brings Home 13 Industry Awards Across the Reeds and Pollies
Echo Canyon Consulting closed out the 2026 awards season with nine Reed Awards and four Pollie Awards, capping the firm's first full election cycle of recognition since its launch.
The Reed Awards, presented at the Charleston Gaillard Center on March 12 by Campaigns & Elections magazine, are named for founder Stanley Foster Reed and are widely considered the most prestigious honors in political consulting. Echo Canyon's wins ran across mail, field, digital, and firm-level categories.
Reed Awards
Best Employer, Republican
Best New Firm
Best How-To Mail Piece, Vote-by-Mail, Non-Partisan
Best Mail Piece, Ballot Initiative, Non-Partisan
Best Mail Piece, IE Campaign, State Legislative, Republican
Best Use of Data Analytics or AI in Field Program
Best GOTV or Field Campaign, Midwest, Southwest, and West, Non-Partisan
Best Online Video, Midwest, Southwest, and West, Non-Partisan
Best Employer and Best New Firm are the two recognitions in the program that evaluate the firm itself rather than a single piece of creative. They reflect peer judgment on culture, leadership, and how the work gets done. Founding partner Ryan Price, who launched Echo Canyon alongside Jon Seaton and Matthew Kenney, credited the team and the firm's commitment to every staff member when accepting the recognition.
The Best Use of Data Analytics or AI in Field Program win is worth a closer look. Echo Canyon's paid field operations utilized AI-assisted canvassing tools to route walkers, cut data faster, and improve voter contact quality. The category reflects a part of the industry that has moved quickly in the last two cycles, and Echo Canyon has been investing in it from the start.
Pollie Awards
Two weeks later at the AAPC's Pollie Awards, held March 24 through 26 at the Omni Amelia Island Resort in Fernandina Beach, Florida, the firm added four additional awards:
Best Field or GOTV Series, Win Together San Antonio
Best Field Program, Local, Win Together San Antonio
Early Voting, Absentee Ballot, Vote-by-Mail, Prairie Village Convenience
Best Use of Podcast Sponsorship or Appearance, Border Security Alliance
The Pollies, presented by the American Association of Political Consultants, are the bipartisan industry's other major honors program. Judging is blind, with firm names and client identities removed, and the panel includes more than 250 consultants from both parties.
Win Together San Antonio, the campaign supporting Propositions A and B on the November 2025 Bexar County ballot, took two of Echo Canyon's four Pollie wins. The propositions authorized funding for upgrades to the Frost Bank Center and Freeman Coliseum and put $311 million toward a new downtown arena for the San Antonio Spurs. Earning recognition for both the broader field series and the local field program suggests judges saw a campaign that worked at the strategic level and held up under operational scrutiny.
The Prairie Village Convenience recognition came in the early vote and mail category, in a municipal race where the persuasion math is different and turnout models don't carry the same weight. The Border Security Alliance win, for podcast sponsorship and appearance work, lands in one of the fastest-growing line items in modern public affairs budgets.
What this means for the work ahead
The wins span both sides of the firm, and that matters. Echo Canyon has built around two distinct service lines: paid field and GOTV operations on the political side, and public affairs work led on the institutional side. The Reed and Pollie wins validate both.
On the field side, recognition for Win Together San Antonio and the AI-assisted field program signals that the canvassing model is working at scale. Voter contact is one of the hardest things to do well in modern campaigns, and the awards for paid field operations mean clients heading into 2026 can point to peer-reviewed results when they ask whether the program will hold up. With heavy lifts already underway in Texas and across the West, the team is going into the cycle with proof of execution, not promises.
On the public affairs side, the mail and podcast wins reflect a different kind of capability. Ballot initiatives, issue advocacy, and corporate public affairs work require a longer time horizon than candidate campaigns and a different kind of message discipline. The Border Security Alliance win is a marker for how Echo Canyon is approaching the part of the public affairs market where audio and earned media have replaced a chunk of what used to be paid TV. Clients navigating regulatory fights, ballot measures, or reputation moments now have a firm with hardware on the wall to prove the approach works.
The cross-pollination between the two sides is part of what makes the awards add up to more than the sum of their parts. Field intelligence informs public affairs strategy. Public affairs relationships open doors for field programs. The same team that helped move a downtown arena vote in San Antonio is the same team that builds podcast strategy for advocacy clients. That alignment is hard to replicate, and the recognition this spring confirms it is showing up in the work.
Honoring the team
Thirteen trophies do not happen because of three founding partners. They happen because of the people who showed up every day in 2025, knocked the doors, wrote the mail, cut the data, built the programs, and held the standards. Every one of these awards belongs to the team behind the work.
To everyone at Echo Canyon, thank you. Thank you for the long hours, the hard conversations, the weekends in the field, and the standards you hold yourselves to when no one is watching. Thank you for treating every campaign like it's the only one, and every voter like they matter. The trophies are nice. The team is the thing.
To the clients who trusted a two-year-old firm with the races that mattered to them, thank you. None of this work exists without your willingness to bet on us.
There is a lot of campaigning ahead in 2026. The team is ready.