Turf cutting

Turf cutting is the automatic way to divide a large source area into a set of smaller, balanced, walkable sub-territories, one per volunteer. Instead of drawing each boundary by hand, you tell the system what you want to cut and how large each piece should be. It does the geometry work and gives you a set of proposals to review before anything becomes permanent.

Turf cutting is a capability your plan must have enabled. It is off by default. If the Cut Jobs section is not visible in your canvassing workspace, contact your account owner about enabling it.

What you provide

To start a cut job you supply two things:

• A source. This is the area or set of doors to divide. You can choose an existing territory, a contact segment, or a walk list.
• A target size. Express this as a target number of doors per turf. The system uses this to decide how many sub-territories to create.

There is a hard limit of 50,000 doors per cut job. Sources larger than that need to be split before cutting.

How the system cuts turfs

Once you start a cut job, the system uses street-map data to group nearby doors into walkable clusters and then draws a polygon around each cluster. Turfs respect natural barriers such as major roads, highways, rivers, and rail lines, so a single turf does not ask a volunteer to cross a highway twice. The result is a set of proposals, each containing a roughly equal share of the doors in your source.

You do not need to understand the geometry. What matters is that the output is reviewable: you see each proposed turf on a map before any territory is created.

Reviewing proposals

After the cut job finishes, you are taken to the proposal map. Each proposed turf is shown as a colored polygon. Select a turf to see its door count and estimated walk effort.

For each proposal you have three options:

• Accept to turn it into a real territory. Accepted territories can optionally be assigned to a specific staff member at the same time.
• Edit to adjust its boundary on the map before committing.
• Reject to discard it. Rejected proposals are not saved as territories.

You can accept some proposals, edit others, and reject the rest in the same session. Nothing is committed until you accept.

Why this matters

Turf cutting removes the most time-consuming part of canvass preparation: the back-and-forth of drawing balanced boundaries by hand. When you have a large source area, letting the system propose turfs means you spend your time reviewing and adjusting, not measuring. The result is a set of territories you can trust are roughly equal in workload before any volunteer hits the street. For sources that do not need splitting, or when you want precise control over a specific boundary, manual territory drawing remains available alongside cut jobs. Both paths lead to the same Canvassing workflow: accepted territories become the basis for walk lists you assign to your volunteers.