Canvassing

Canvassing is the workspace tool for organizing door-to-door field outreach. Open Canvassing in your workspace sidebar to reach the dashboard. 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. Draw boundaries directly on the map using the draw controls. 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.

You can create, edit, and delete territories from the Territories section. Assign a territory to a team or individual volunteer from the territory detail panel.

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 active session state and the route each volunteer has traveled, in real time when they are online.

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.

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.