Voter Contact Calculator
Turn your district, your targeting, and your contact plan into a real number of printed pieces — before you order literature you will not use.
Enter the number of households in your district.
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Voter contact FAQ
We design campaign print in Buffalo, MN and produce it with trusted print partners — tell us your count and we will quote the run.
Work from households, not voters, and not from a gut number. Take the households in your district, cut to the share you are actually targeting, then multiply by how many times you plan to hit each one — door passes and mail drops counted separately. Add a spare percentage on top. That total, not a round number someone suggested, is your order.
It is the slice of your district you have decided to actually contact. Campaigns rarely work every door — they cut to likely voters, persuadable households, and the precincts that decide the race, because time and money are finite. Your universe is that share expressed as a percentage of total households. If you have not built a list yet, use 100% and treat the result as a ceiling.
More than once. The calculator rates your plan on total touches — door passes plus mail drops. Five or more reads as a strong contact plan, three to four as solid, since most voters need repetition. Two touches is a floor rather than a strategy, and one touch rarely moves anyone. If your budget forces a cut, cut the universe before you cut the touches.
In both directions, and usually for the same reason: nobody did the multiplication. Plans get described in touches and precincts, then translated into an order by guesswork. The other pattern we see is allocation — campaigns tend to over-order yard signs, which announce a name, and under-order the literature a voter actually stops and reads. Run both numbers before you split the money.
How to calculate campaign literature quantity
Start with households, not voters. A piece of literature lands at an address, not at a person, so a couple who both vote at the same address is one drop, not two. Then cut. Campaigns do not work every door — they target: likely voters, persuadable households, the precincts that actually decide the race. That share is your universe, and the calculator takes it as a percentage. Twelve thousand households at 60% targeting gives 7,200 targeted households. No list yet? Leave it at 100% and read the result as a ceiling rather than a plan.
From there it is multiplication, and the multipliers are your plan. Each door pass is one piece per targeted household, so two passes across 7,200 households is 14,400 door pieces — usually door hangers, since nobody answers for most of them. Each mail drop works the same way: three drops to the same 7,200 households is 21,600 mailers. The tool keeps door and mail in separate columns because they are separate production runs on separate calendars — see the campaign literature guide for the door side and the political direct mail guide for the mail side.
Add the two together and pad. 14,400 door pieces plus 21,600 mailers is 36,000, and the calculator multiplies by your spare percentage — 5% by default — then rounds up: 37,800 pieces. The spare is not padding for its own sake. Pieces get rained on, dropped, miscounted, handed out at a parade nobody planned for, and mail files shed addresses. The cost of 1,800 extra pieces on one run is small; the cost of a second short run at the end of the race is a whole setup charge spread across almost nothing. Our quantity price break calculator shows how steeply per-piece cost moves with volume, and the campaign print budget guide covers where the rest of the money goes.
The number that matters most is the smallest one: touches per household, which is just door passes plus mail drops. The example plan runs five, and the tool calls that a strong contact plan. Three or four is solid, because most voters need repetition. Two is light — two touches is a minimum, not a strategy. One touch rarely moves anyone. Repetition is the whole mechanism: seen once, your name is a stranger’s; seen five times, it belongs to a candidate. That is also why campaigns misallocate — they over-order yard signs (our campaign sign quantity calculator sizes that side just as honestly) and under-order the literature a voter stands still and reads.
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