Canvassing as a volunteer

If your organization runs door-to-door canvassing, you can work your assigned walk lists and log results directly from the volunteer portal — even without a signal.

Finding your walk lists

A walk list shows up when someone on your organization's team assigns it to you, and you get a notification that opens your walk lists. On the phone the list appears within moments while the app is open. If a list is reassigned to someone else, it leaves your lists and you are told.

Open Canvassing in the sidebar. You'll see every walk list assigned to you, each showing its progress (doors completed out of total) and status. If you have an active canvassing session already in progress, a banner at the top shows how long you've been out, how many doors you've knocked, and how many contacts you've made, with Continue and End Session actions.

Before you head out, use the download button next to a walk list to save it for offline use — useful anywhere cell signal is unreliable.

Starting a session

Choose Start on a walk list to begin. While you work it, the list is yours: nobody else can start it. If you can't start a list because it isn't available to you right now, it may have been reassigned; reload to refresh your lists. This opens the address for your first stop, along with any resident information your organization has on file (name, phone, tags) and how many times the address has been attempted before.

Recording a result at the door

For each address, choose what happened:

• Contact Made — opens your organization's canvassing script (if any) with questions to record, including required ones that must be answered before you can save.
• Not Home, Refused, Come Back, Moved, Wrong Address, Language Barrier, or Inaccessible — the other outcomes, with a notes field for anything worth flagging.

Use the arrows to move between addresses in your list, or return to a previous one if you need to.

Who sees what you record

Your notes, your GPS location and any photos you take at a door are limited to you, the leads of the team that owns the walk list, and your organization's field managers (people whose role includes assigning walk lists). Leads and field managers can access them, though no screen shows them yet. Other volunteers cannot; they see only leaderboard counts.

The result you choose at a door is shared more widely. It is saved to the contact's record together with your name as the volunteer who recorded it, which your organization's workspace staff can access, and it updates that address's status on the walk list, which everyone who can see the walk list sees. Survey answers can reach the contact too: an answer your organization maps to a tag adds that tag to the contact, and an answer to a support-level question records the contact's support score.

Working offline

If you lose connection mid-shift, your results aren't lost. The app queues everything you record locally (including your GPS location at the time) and syncs automatically once you're back online — a status indicator on the page shows whether you're offline and how many results are waiting to sync.

A few things to know about what stays on your device:

• Downloaded walk lists are removed from the device when you sign out, when someone else signs in on it, and when you are no longer a member of the organization: right away if you leave, or the next time you open the app with a connection if an admin removes you. A list that is reassigned to someone else stays on the device until you sign out.
• If some doors haven't synced when you sign out or leave an organization, you are asked first: Sync now, Discard (after a second confirmation, because discarded results can't be recovered), or stay signed in.
• Results you haven't synced stay on the device, for your account only, until they sync. Someone else signing in on the same device never sends them.

Finishing a walk list

Once every address has a result, the page shows your total doors and contacts made for that list, with a link back to your walk lists. Use End Session from the walk lists page when you're done for the day, even if the list isn't finished. Ending the session frees the walk list right away, so a team lead can hand it to someone else.

Why this matters

Door-to-door contact is one of the most effective ways an organization can reach people, but only if every knock gets recorded — even the not-homes and refusals. That data tells organizers which addresses still need a second pass and which streets are covered, so the next volunteer isn't knocking on doors that were already answered.

If you're looking for how an organization builds walk lists and scripts in the first place, see Canvassing.