Door Hangers for Election Canvassing: What Works and What Gets Recycled

Watch a canvass for an hour and the case makes itself. Nobody answers at the first door, so the flyer goes… where? Wedged in a screen door, where the next gust takes it into the hedge. Into the mailbox, under four pizza menus and a hydro bill. Or onto the mat, where it is a wet rectangle by morning.

A door hanger has one job and it does it: it stays put, at eye level, on the thing the resident has to touch to get inside. Nothing else is on the knob, so it competes with nothing. That is also why targeted local print still works when mailbox drops do not.

The advantage campaign managers care about more is that a hanger is proof you were there— a marker on the door and a line on the walk list. A hung door is a covered door, and coverage is the only number a field team can manage.

And the point that surprises first-time candidates — a hand-delivered hanger is not mail. No postage, no mailbox, no postal service in the loop. That removes a layer of planning. It does not remove the other rules, which we get to below.

Three sizes cover almost every campaign. 4.25″ × 11″is the workhorse — tall enough to read from the sidewalk, wide enough for a name, a photo and three short lines. 3.5″ × 8.5″ is compact and cheaper per piece, better for a one-message reminder than a full pitch. 5.5″ × 8.5″ is the wide format, worth it only if you have edited your copy twice and still need the room.

The die cut is what people forget until they see a proof. We cut a round hole plus a slotso the piece slides onto a knob, and that cut eats the top inch and a half. Put the candidate's name up there and the hole goes through it, so treat the top strip as dead space. Say what you are walking, too — newer builds and accessible units often have lever handles, and we position the slot accordingly.

14pt cardis the baseline and the right answer for most runs — heavy enough to survive a doorknob, a walk down the block and a volunteer's bag, in gloss, matte or uncoated. 16pt laminated is the step up: thicker, sealed, and it shrugs off rain and rough handling.

Coating is not cosmetic in October.Overnight dew, a wet railing, an afternoon of drizzle — uncoated stock drinks all of it and goes soft and blotchy, while a coated card sheds water and is legible the next morning. The one reason to choose uncoated is that a pen has to write on it, which is its own section below. Two cheap extras that pay for themselves: rounded corners, because square ones fray in a bag, and a perforated tear-off strip. More in the flyer sizes and paper guide.

A hanger has an outward face — what the resident sees hanging there — and an inward face they only see if they pick it up. Two audiences, two jobs. The outward face is a two-second read: name, office, one reason. That is the whole brief. Anything else on it costs you the three things that have to survive a glance from three metres away by someone carrying groceries.

The back carries the substance. Three or four priorities in short lines, not paragraphs. Voting day, as a day and a date. How to reach the campaign, volunteer or request a sign. And if the piece comes from a registered third-party advertiserrather than a candidate's own campaign, the back is where the identifying information belongs — the registered advertiser's name, the contact information required under the Act, and the municipality where they are registered. Those are two different things; more on that below.

Both sides costs roughly a third more per piece and is nearly always right, for a reason that is not about volume: it is the only way to keep the front clean. The honest exception is a late get-out-the-vote piece — "Vote Monday, October 26", a name, and where to find polling information. That works single-sided, prints cheaper and blankets more doors — but it is a separate piece, printed later, in a smaller quantity.

Most doors do not answer. That is not a failure of the canvass, it is the canvass. Which is why experienced organizers ask first for the "sorry we missed you" variant, and why first-time campaigns almost never think to order it.

It is the same piece with one change: a blank panel, roughly three inches by an inch and a half, a couple of ruled lines, room for a name. A volunteer writes two lines by hand and hangs it. That handwriting proves a person stood on that step, which no printed line can do — and in a race where the candidate is not yet a household name, that is the entire point of knocking.

Here is what gets ordered wrong every cycle. A ballpoint will not write on gloss. It skates, it smears, and half an hour later the ink has transferred onto the next hanger in the stack. If people are writing on these, that part of the job has to run on 14pt uncoated, the writable matte card. So split the order: coated for the general drop, a smaller uncoated run for the doors volunteers are actually knocking. Two versions, one order, one proof cycle — and give every canvasser the same pen.

Add the perforated tear-offwhile you are there. The tab does real work on a campaign piece — a lawn-sign request, a volunteer sign-up, contact details that end up on a fridge. A household that tears off a lawn-sign request has turned a door knock into visible turf, which is the pipeline described in how many lawn signs a campaign needs.

Order too few and you are reordering in the last three weeks at a worse price with no time to spare. Order too many and you are recycling cartons in November. Do not guess the number — derive it:

• Doors per shift.Not a figure from a blog — yours. Send one real team out for one real shift, count what they covered, use that. A townhouse block and a rural road are not the same job.
• Volunteers per shift × shifts remaining. Be honest about the volunteers you have, then about how many shifts fit before Monday, October 26, 2026.
• Multiply, then add 10 to 15 percent. Hangers get bent, rained on, dropped, and every volunteer takes a stack home and forgets it in a car.
• Count the variants separately. The write-on version and the late get-out-the-vote piece are their own numbers, not a slice of the main run.

Then think about how to buy it, because door hangers price in bands and the bands are steep — our live pricing starts around $50 for 100 and $135 for 1,000 on everyday stock, single-sided, before a second side, heavier card or a tear-off. Treat that as the shape of the curve, not your quote; the studio prices your exact configuration. Three runs of 300 cost meaningfully more than one run of 1,000, so the compromise is one large run of the undated pieceprinted early, then small late runs of anything dated. A box of "Vote Monday, October 26" hangers is worth nothing on October 27.

Hangers arrive in bulk cartons, which is not how a human being uses them. Ask for the run banded into counts a person can carry— fifty or a hundred — rather than one loose box. It costs nothing to specify, and if the bundle equals one shift, the number a volunteer took is the number you recorded.

A complete canvassing kit is short:

• One banded bundle of hangers, sized to the shift.
• A smaller bundle of the uncoated write-on version, and a pen that works on it.
• The walk list on a clipboard, with somewhere to record what was covered.
• Lawn-sign request slips, or the tear-off tab doing that job on the hanger itself.
• Something that identifies the volunteer at the door. This matters more than people expect: at six o'clock on a dark October evening, a stranger on the step reads very differently in a printed campaign shirt than in a parka. The options are in campaign t-shirts and volunteer apparel, and printed tees are the cheapest identifiable thing you can put on a team.

Storage is the unglamorous last mile: card stock takes on moisture, and a carton left on a concrete garage floor through an Ottawa October comes back with soft, wavy edges. Indoors, off the floor, closed between shifts.

Design for the person who is notreading it — walking past, unlocking a door with one hand. You get two seconds and three pieces of information: the name, the office, and one reason. Everything else is for the minority who pick it up.

Test legibility at arm's length.Print the proof at actual size and hold it at the distance a hanger sits from someone standing at their own door. If the name is not instantly legible it is too small — and it usually is, because the layout was built on a screen at 200 percent. High contrast, weight in the type, nothing important reversed out of a busy photograph, no all-caps body copy.

A photo does real work for a first-time candidate. An unfamiliar name is an abstraction; a face is a person, and the same face on the hanger, the lawn signs and the website compounds across a neighbourhood. Use a recent, well-lit headshot, cropped tight, eyes to camera. A dim one pulled off a social profile is worse than none.

Mechanically it is a normal full-bleed job: 0.125″ of bleed, type an eighth to a quarter inch inside the trim, everything clear of the die-cut hole, and CMYKrather than RGB — the electric blues and oranges that look great on a monitor shift on paper, and campaign colours are exactly the ones that shift. See what print bleed is, CMYK versus RGB and how to prepare print-ready artwork.

If nobody on the campaign is a designer, you can still start: lay the piece out in our free online design studio and see it on the product before you spend anything. And whoever built the file, a human designer here opens it before it goes on press and checks resolution, colour, type size and where that hole will land. If something is wrong you get told what and why, not a bad box of hangers.

The boundary first. We print what a campaign approves, and this is not legal advice.Election sign and advertising rules are set by the municipality and administered by the municipal clerk, and the clerk's office is the authority on every question here.

Which leads to the thing that trips up campaigns working across a region: the rules vary by municipality.What follows is the City of Ottawa's and nobody else's — Toronto, Mississauga, Gatineau and every other municipality set their own windows, setbacks and removal deadlines, so confirm yours with your own clerk before printing anything dated. In Ottawa, under by-laws in force since January 1, 2022, election signs run on this 2026 calendar:

• Private property: no sooner than 45 daysbefore voting day — Friday, September 11, 2026.
• Public property and the city road allowance: 30 days before — Saturday, September 26, 2026.
• Removal: every election sign down within 72 hours after voting day — by Thursday, October 29, 2026.
• Setback: on private property, no sign within three metres of an intersection.

The governing rules are the Municipal Elections Act, 1996, Ottawa's Temporary Signs on Private Property By-law and the Signs on City Roads By-law (No. 2003-520); sign complaints in Ottawa go to 3-1-1. The full calendar is in when you can put up election signs in Ontario, and the Ottawa specifics in election lawn signs in Ottawa.

Note that those windows are written for signs. A door hanger is literature a volunteer places on a handle, not a sign planted on a lawn or in a road allowance — so do not assume a hanger inherits a sign's dates in either direction. Ask the clerk how your municipality treats hand-delivered campaign literature. One phone call, worth making before a print run rather than after.

A related distinction that genuinely matters: registered third-party advertisers are not candidates.A third-party advertiser must register with the municipal clerk and must identify itself on its advertising — the registered advertiser's name, the contact information required by the Act, and the municipality where it is registered. A candidate's own campaign material is a different thing, and the clerk will tell you which you are. The answer changes what has to be printed on the back.

One constraint that has nothing to do with by-laws: some condominium and apartment buildings, gated communities and individual households post no-soliciting rules, and a hanger left against a posted rule buys a complaint rather than a vote. Brief canvassers to read the door and skip it.

Finally the clock. Ontario municipal elections, Ottawa included, fall on the fourth Monday of October: in 2026, Monday, October 26, with the new council term beginning Sunday, November 15, 2026. From the start of September that is roughly eight weeks. Door hangers take about 3 to 5 business daysto print, die-cut and trim once you have approved a proof and paid, plus transit outside Ottawa and Gatineau, plus however long the campaign takes to agree on the copy — honestly the longest part. Work backwards from the day you want volunteers walking, not from voting day.

One more thing, plainly: we print for any registered candidate or campaign, regardless of affiliation. We have produced campaign materials for mayoral and city-council campaigns — signs, door hangers and volunteer apparel — and we know how the season actually runs. That is a statement about the work we have done — not about anybody's politics, not a claim that any past client endorses us, and not an endorsement of anyone by us.

The campaign-specific decisions are above. What is left is mechanical:

1. Tell us the size, the stock and the split— typically a coated 4.25 × 11 general drop plus a smaller uncoated write-on run, both double-sided, one with a tear-off.
2. Send artwork, or build it yourself in the free studio. If all you have is a rough idea, describe it and we will lay out both faces.
3. Approve the free proof— both faces, the die-cut hole positioned on your art, and an exact price, before anything goes on press.
4. We print, die-cut and bandin about 3 to 5 business days, then it is free pickup or delivery across Ottawa–Gatineau and shipping elsewhere in Canada.

Ordering the campaign's print in one go beats three separate jobs. Most municipal campaigns need door hangers, coroplast lawn signs, flyers or literature, business cards and shirts for the volunteers. The full list, in the order you actually need it, is in the municipal campaign print checklist for 2026. If you would rather see the piece before committing to anything, start in the design studio — free, no account, and a human designer still checks the file before it goes near a press.