Teaching a county a procedure in ninety days

Eric Reed is running for Dallas County District Attorney as an independent write-in. His name appears nowhere on the ballot — a voter has to choose the write-in option and enter it themselves, and a vote entered wrong is not counted.

That one fact reorganises everything. This is not a persuasion campaign; it is a procedure campaign. Repetition beats variety, one spelling beats a clever variation, and one web address beats two. And it arrives with a deadline that does not move, on a campaign that started with no identity, no website, no channels, no CRM, no analytics, and no press operation.

We started where a campaign this shape actually breaks: not in the design, but in the drift. Seven people writing across four tools will produce two spellings of the treasurer's name, two web addresses, and three taglines — and one of them will reach a printer.

So the first thing we built was not a page. It was a single source of truth that outranks every other document on the campaign, with a changelog and a verification tier on every claim, and a decision register beside it holding one row per subject and one current answer. Then the identity, built around a ballot-instruction system rather than a logo — because the thing every asset has to carry is not a mark, it is an instruction.

A ten-page Webflow site, live twenty-two days after the proposal was signed, with a dedicated How to Vote module, three consented capture forms, structured schema on every page, and a publish gate so nothing reaches the public without review.

Behind it, the operating system. Payments on hosted action pages rather than embeds, so mobile wallets and the legal disclaimer both render. A CRM. A three-layer analytics stack. A press pipeline that reads the alerts, de-duplicates them against a ledger, tells a Dallas Eric Reed from a Maryland one, and delivers a triaged digest twice a day. A social content library with named pillars, per-channel targeting, and a per-piece disclaimer determination.

And compliance rails throughout — one verbatim disclaimer, the donor fields the law requires captured at the point of capture, and a written map of what can and cannot legally endorse a candidate in this county.

That last one changed the ground game. Nearly every organisation a campaign instinctively courts here is either a 501(c)(3) or a government agency, and barred. Finding that out in week two instead of week ten was worth more than any asset we shipped.

A campaign that went from nothing to a live, measured, compliant digital operation in three weeks, and has run on it since.

22 days from signed proposal to live site, ten pages and three CMS collections at launch.

86% of press-alert noise removed automatically — 119 of 139 captured items rejected before a human read them.

8 of 11 inbound supporters captured with explicit SMS consent from day one, on a campaign whose texting programme had not started yet.

The consent number is the quiet one. SMS consent cannot be captured retroactively. Every day a form runs without it is a day of list that can never be texted — so the campaign will have a legal list the day it needs one.