Vote For Change LLC
We're not a consultancy. We're a parts shop.
A Michigan political cooperative with talent across the state. We assess your budget, work out what you actually need, and sell you that — whether it's one $200 lit piece or a full statewide field operation.
The model
Why we cost less
Not a discount and not a favour. Three structural things, each of which you can check:
We hire in Michigan
A national vendor's invoice carries travel, lodging, and head-office overhead on top of local labour. We employ Michiganders who sleep at home, so that layer never gets added.
Vertically integrated
Field, design, mail, and data under one roof, plus partner vendors at cost. Nothing gets subcontracted with a margin stacked on it and passed back to you.
Cooperative, not a pyramid
No junior-staff bench to keep billable and no partner draw to fund. You buy the parts you need, at the scale you need, and stop there.
About us
Leadership
Chief Executive Officer
Connor Berdy
Runs the business side — scoping, pricing, and the relationships that carry a program from first conversation to signed budget. Came up through nonprofits and PACs, managing campaigns from city council to Congress.
Chief Innovation Officer
Elena J. Greer
Runs the technical side and decides what the shop builds rather than buys, and shares the client work. Served on the Michigan Democratic Party board as Youth Vice Chair and ran communications for the Ingham County Democratic Party. Came up through nonprofits and PACs, managing campaigns from city council to Congress.
What we do
Services
Prices below assume a standard universe of 20,000 targeted high-propensity voters — a fair ballpark, not a quote. Everything moves with scope, scale, timeline, and volume.
Field & voter contact
- Paid canvassing
- $1.35–$2.25 / door
- Priced by turf density, because that's what actually drives cost. A canvasser sustains 22–25 doors an hour in dense Detroit precincts and 10–14 on a rural route. Hiring, training, deployment, quality control, and data all included.
- Phone banking
- $0.75–$1.30 / call
- Priced per attempt rather than per completion, because contact rates swing hard by universe and time of day.
- Peer-to-peer texting
- $0.015–$0.03 / segment
- Billed at platform cost with a flat management fee — we don't mark up the per-message rate, and you can audit the platform invoice against ours. One pass to 20,000 voters runs $600–$1,000. We quote by segment, not by "text", because long messages and images bill as several.
- Petition signatures
- $6–$9 / signature
- $6 at high volume, $9 for local or small-scale, plus operations budget and a flat management fee. Priced per signature collected — see the note on units below.
- Voter registration drives
- By scope
- Registration programs targeting new, young, and under-registered voters, with capture feeding straight into your contact universe.
- GOTV & Election Day ops
- By scope
- Knock-and-drag, rides to the polls, poll monitoring, chase programs against outstanding absentees, and war-room management on the day.
- Absentee & vote-by-mail
- By scope
- Ballot application mailings, return chase, and early-vote site promotion — built around Michigan's expanded no-reason absentee and early voting under Proposal 2 (2022).
Mail, print & design
- Direct mail
- $0.37–$0.45 / piece
- Micro-targeted through our union print partner at USPS Marketing Mail rates, plus $400 flat production per 20,000. Roughly $7,400–$9,000 for a 20K drop.
- EDDM flats
- from $0.242 / piece
- Every Door Direct Mail plus production — about $5,240 per 20,000 where saturation beats targeting.
- Graphic design
- from $200
- In-house, per project. Lit pieces, mail, digital creative, signage.
Digital & communications
- Paid media placement
- 8–10% of gross
- Against a 15% industry standard, disclosed on every invoice. Digital, search, programmatic, and broadcast — strategy, creative, buy management, and reporting.
- Social media management
- By scope
- Organic content, posting, and community engagement across platforms.
- Email program
- By scope
- List building, fundraising, supporter comms, drips, and analytics.
- Video production
- By project
- Through our media partner, whose credits include work for U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin, Meijer, and Pure Michigan. Drone capability included.
- Comms strategy & earned media
- By scope
- Message development, press outreach, press conferences, rapid response. Crisis comms on retainer or as needed.
- Web design & management
- By scope
- Build plus ongoing maintenance, scoped individually.
Consulting & staffing
- Part-time consulting
- $2,000 / mo
- General campaign support: plan development, ongoing strategic feedback, comms drafting, launch planning, fundraising strategy, and weekly check-ins with you and your team.
- Full-time consulting
- $4,000 / mo
- The same, embedded in day-to-day operations.
- Campaign finance compliance
- $1,500 / mo
- Expense and contribution tracking, state compliance, filing preparation, and budget assistance.
- Senior advisor
- $2,000 / mo
- Strategic advisory without the operational load.
- Campaign manager placement
- $2,000–$4,000 / mo
- Recruited, hired, paid, and supervised by us, invoiced to you. We also place finance directors, treasurers, field directors, coalitions and outreach leads, organizers, and PAC or nonprofit specialists.
- Fundraising retainer
- By scope
- Bundler identification and management, donor targeting on proprietary and partner data, call time strategy, event planning, digital fundraising, and donor tracking. Clients get our statewide donor networks segmented by giving history, issue affinity, geography, and capacity.
Research & strategy
- Opposition research & tracking
- By depth
- Public record analysis, voting history, vulnerability assessment, and ongoing tracking of an opponent's appearances.
- Polling & survey research
- By method
- Benchmark and tracking polls, focus groups, dial tests. We manage design, fielding, analysis, and interpretation through vendor partnerships.
- Candidate training
- By scope
- Debate prep, media training, stump speech development, on-camera coaching.
- Endorsement strategy
- By scope
- Outreach to electeds, labour, community groups, advocacy orgs, and editorial boards — plus the announcement sequencing.
Advocacy & government
- Issue advocacy campaigns
- By scope
- Full infrastructure for ballot initiatives, referendum fights, and grassroots pressure — the same field, comms, and data we run for candidates, tuned to issue audiences.
- Governmental affairs
- By scope
- Strategic introductions from city hall to Capitol Hill, legislative monitoring, policy research and briefs, testimony preparation, and coalition coordination.
- MDP convention strategy
- By scope
- Delegate recruitment and whip operations, delegate data and weighting, floor strategy, vote counting, slate card support, and convention logistics.
Against the market
Where we save you the most — and least
Every comparison below carries a tier saying how checkable it is. A published rate card and something someone remembers seeing are not the same evidence and shouldn't be presented as if they were.
Tier 1
Published rate cards
Vendor pricing anyone can pull up. Strongest evidence, and the easiest for you to check without us.
Tier 2
Public filings
FEC and state disbursements by real campaigns. Not estimates — what committees actually paid, on the record.
Tier 3
Direct observation
Rates our people saw billed from inside national firms. Real, but you can't independently verify it, so we label it.
| Service | Us | Market | Saving | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| General consulting retainer | $2,000–$4,000/mo | $25,000–$100,000/mo | 92–96% | Tier 2 |
| Paid canvassing | $1.35–$2.25/door | $4.00–$7.00/door | 66–68% | Tier 3 |
| P2P texting, 100K segments | $1,500–$3,000 | $1,900–$6,300 | 21–52% | Tier 1 |
| Paid media placement | 8–10% of gross | 15% of gross | 33–47% | Tier 1 |
| Direct mail, 6×9 at 20K | $0.37–$0.45/pc | $0.40–$0.50/pc | 8–10% | Tier 1 |
Where the $4–$7 door figure comes from
It isn't a published rate card — no national field vendor publishes per-door pricing, and FEC records carry dollar amounts without door counts. It's what our people saw billed from inside national field operations, where roughly $2.00–$2.50 of local labour picks up travel, lodging, overhead, and a management fee. That stack is the gap we remove by hiring in-state. Tier 3
Petitions, stated in matched units
Our $6–$9 is per signature collected. The figure usually quoted — Ballotpedia's $14.87 average for 2024 — is per signature required, a larger denominator, because campaigns collect a buffer over the legal minimum. At a typical 1.4× buffer ours converts to $8.40–$12.60 per required signature. That's the honest comparison, and it's the one we'd want if we were buying.
On texting, we're competitive rather than miraculous
We buy on the same platforms you could, so the raw message cost isn't magic. What you're paying for is that we pass the platform rate through without a markup and charge a flat fee to run the program, instead of marking up the per-message rate and calling the management free.
Case study
2025 Detroit mayoral race
A paid field program built from nothing in under two months: 60+ canvassers hired and managed, 75,000 Detroit voters reached at $1.13 a door.
That's dense urban turf at the bottom of what any turf can sustain — 25 doors an hour, held for the length of the program. We're citing it because it's the cheapest number we have, and you should know it's the floor rather than the average.
What it took
- Under 8 weeks from cold start to full deployment
- 60+ canvassers recruited, trained, and supervised in-house
- 75,000 voters contacted
- 25 doors/hour sustained
Access
What you get in the door
- Michigan Democratic Party contacts and active statewide delegate lists
- Statewide union lists and labour leadership networks
- Bundlers and high-level donors
- Proprietary donor, voter, and activist data
- 501(c)(3), 501(c)(4), PAC, 527, and IE network contacts
- Elected officials from local to federal
- A distributed bench of experienced Michigan operatives
- Partner vendors from mail through video production
Wage floor, and why our rates hold
Michigan's minimum wage rose to $13.73 on January 1, 2026 and goes to $15.00 on January 1, 2027. Our rates are built to absorb that, so a program contracted for 2028 won't need repricing mid-stream. We'd rather quote something we can honour than something we have to renegotiate.
We staff in-state, and pay for it
Canvassers are Michiganders on $25 an hour who claim their own shifts. No crews flown in, no per-diem stack on your invoice, and people who already know the neighbourhood they're knocking.