Canvassing
How to define territories, generate walk lists, run offline-capable canvassing sessions, and capture results with custom door statuses.
On this page
Canvassing is the workspace tool for organizing door-to-door field outreach. Open Canvassing in your workspace sidebar to reach the dashboard. Its door and contact totals count every walk list in your organization, whichever team owns it. From there you have six sub-sections: Territories, Teams, Walk Lists, Cut Jobs, Live Tracking, and Scripts. The tool is capability-gated, meaning your organization needs the canvassing capability enabled before the section appears.
Territories
A territory is a geographic boundary that defines where a group of volunteers will knock doors. Each territory you save is stored as a spatial polygon, which the system uses to locate addresses that fall within it when you generate a walk list.
Open Canvassing, then Territories. The page shows your territories on a map, as cards (Grid) or as rows (List); the view you pick stays in the page address, so you can bookmark or share it. Search by name or description, and filter by status. Import brings in territories from a GeoJSON file, and New territory opens the drawing map.
Drawing a territory
On New territory, use the draw controls on the map to outline the boundary, then give the territory a name in the panel on the right. Create territory stays disabled until the territory has both a name and a boundary; hover over it to see which one is missing. If you close or reload the tab before creating it, your browser asks you to confirm.
Working with a territory from the map
Click a territory on the map to open its panel on the right. The panel shows doors visited, contacts made, progress, who it is assigned to, and its tags. From the panel you can:
- Open territory to edit its details or boundary;
- Assign or Reassign it to a canvasser;
- View walk lists made from it, or Generate walk list;
- Delete territory, from the menu at the top of the panel.
Close the panel with the close button, the Escape key, or a click on an empty part of the map.
The walk-list actions appear only for team members who can assign walk lists to canvassers (see Who can manage canvassing).
Editing a territory
The territory page has three tabs:
- Overview: the same summary as the map panel.
- Details: name, description, status, color, priority and tags. Priority is a whole number from 0 to 10; higher numbers sort first. Color is a hex value such as
#3B82F6. - Walk lists: every walk list made from the territory, with a link to each. This tab appears for team members who can assign walk lists to canvassers.
To change the shape, choose Edit boundary, adjust the outline on the map, and save. Save changes appears at the top of the page as soon as you have unsaved changes; if you close or reload the tab before saving, your browser asks you to confirm.
Team members who can see a territory but cannot edit territories see the same page read-only, without the edit and delete controls. A canvassing team lead can still reassign their team's territories from it.
Deleting a territory
Deleting a territory removes it and its boundary, and cannot be undone. Walk lists made from it, and past canvassing sessions in it, are kept but are no longer linked to a territory. A territory that was used as the source of a turf cut cannot be deleted; you see a message saying so.
Walk lists
A walk list is the set of addresses a volunteer will visit, scoped to a territory and assigned to a specific volunteer. When you generate a walk list from a territory, the system puts addresses in an optimized walking sequence so the volunteer takes the most efficient route. You can import voter-file data into a walk list using the import dialog.
See Turf cutting for details on auto-splitting a large territory into balanced sub-turfs.
Volunteer sessions and offline mode
When a volunteer starts a canvassing session, a session record is created that ties them to their assigned walk list and territory. The session works offline: the device keeps the current walk state locally, so the volunteer can record attempts without a network connection. Completed attempts queue on the device and sync back to the server when connectivity is restored.
Live Tracking lets you see who has an active session and how many doors they have knocked, in real time when they are online. It does not show where anyone is.
Recording attempts and scripts
At each door, the volunteer records an attempt for that address. The result they select comes from your org's door statuses -- codes like "Spoke with target," "Left literature," or "Not home," each marked as counting or not counting as a contact. See Door statuses for how status sets work and how to request a change.
You can also attach a script to a walk list to give volunteers consistent talking points and a structured survey at the door. Scripts support branching questions with skip logic, and survey responses are stored against the session record. See Canvassing scripts for full configuration details.
Who can see door-level data
The notes, GPS location and photos recorded at a door are limited to the volunteer who recorded them, leads of the team that owns the walk list (see Canvassing teams), and people whose role includes Assign walk lists to canvassers. Owners and admins always have that permission. Leads and people with that permission can access these details, though no screen shows them yet. Everyone else on your team, including people who can open the Canvassing dashboard, sees counts and totals only. A walk list that belongs to no team has no lead, so only its volunteer and people with that permission can access what was recorded on it.
Other parts of an attempt are shared more widely:
- The result is saved to the contact's record together with the volunteer who recorded it, which people who can open your staff workspace can access. It also updates that address's status on the walk list, which everyone who can see the walk list sees.
- Survey answers reach the contact when your script maps them: an answer mapped to a tag adds that tag to the contact, and an answer to a support-level question records the contact's support score.
- Notes are not copied to the contact's activity: a contact's record shows that a door conversation happened and its result, not what was said.
Who can manage canvassing
Owners and admins can manage everything in Canvassing. To give someone the same reach over one part of it without making them an admin, give them a custom role with the matching permission (see Roles and permissions for your team):
| Permission | Lets them, across your whole organization |
|---|---|
| Create and edit canvassing territories | Create, edit, delete and reassign territories, and cut turf |
| Assign walk lists to canvassers | Generate walk lists from any territory, assign and unassign them, change their status, delete them, release a list another volunteer has checked out, and access every door attempt's notes, GPS location and photos |
Turf cutting starts from the Canvassing overview, so a role that cuts turf also needs View canvassing dashboards and territories, and your plan must include turf cutting. Everyone else on your team canvasses the walk lists assigned to them. Importing a voter file into a walk list stays with owners and admins, because it also adds people to your contacts.
Why this matters
Consistent, well-organized canvassing is one of the highest-leverage activities an organizing campaign can run. When your territories are drawn clearly, your walk lists are scoped correctly, and your door statuses are configured to match your goals, you get reliable contact rates and clean data you can actually use to make decisions. Offline mode means a bad cell signal does not lose a volunteer's work, and live tracking means you can respond to problems in the field before a shift ends. Taking a few minutes to configure the tool before your first deployment pays back every time you run a new canvas.