Canvassing: turfs, the Companion, and the field report

A turf is one walkable batch of doors, cut from a list you already have. You hand a turf to volunteers, they knock with the Canvass Companion on their phone, and every answer lands back in the CRM. Open Canvassing under Field in the sidebar. The sentence under the title sums the operation up: how many turfs exist, how many are being knocked right now, how many doors have been tried, and how many turfs still have nobody on them.

Cut new turfs

1. 1Pick what the outing is forEvery door is the classic persuasion canvass: survey, issues, follow-ups. GOTV sends volunteers to remind identified supporters to vote — quick taps instead of a survey. Sign & flyer delivery cuts an outing from the approved request pool instead of a list: pick whether it carries yard signs, flyers, or both, and every waiting request of that kind with a located address becomes a door.
2. 2Pick whose doorsNamed choices, spelled out so nothing is hidden: Everyone (every located household in the workspace — no list), All supporters, All untouched (never knocked), or Not canvassed in X days — each of those is a smart list the app creates for you the first time and reuses after that. You can also pick any list you already built.
3. 3Choose doors per turf, and on foot or by car30 for a short shift, 40 recommended, 50 for experienced canvassers, 60 for pairs. The preview does the math in the open and estimates the walk time. Walking turfs group by street; driving turfs get an ordered stop list with navigation.
4. 4ConfirmTurfs are cut from the addresses the app has placed on the map, into batches whose doors sit next to each other. A turf never crosses a boundary line, and those lines tend to follow the rivers, rail lines and arterial roads, so nobody is sent across one. New turfs arrive marked Needs canvassers.

Which line that is depends on the maps your workspace holds for this campaign. Cutting uses the finest voting subdivision available — a precinct, a polling division, a poll — and falls back to the seat area (the ward, riding or congressional district) when there is no subdivision map. With no boundary map at all, doors are grouped purely by which ones sit near each other, and those turfs are labelled as unbounded so nobody mistakes the grouping for a real line. Getting a map in is quick and free: see Boundary maps, or draw one yourself if your municipality publishes nothing usable.

GOTV outings: remind supporters to vote

A turf cut in GOTV mode changes what the volunteer’s phone shows, not how anything is stored. Tapping a door’s row unfolds its one-tap buttons — Reminded, Already voted, Nobody home — plus a Navigate button and an Open this door link to the full door screen; the Navigate button is there because a GOTV walk skips most doors and the next one is rarely next door. Opening a door shows one card per person with the same two taps; "Already voted" records the person’s voting status, so the green already-voted check appears everywhere the person does. A door that turns into a real conversation is one tap from the full survey. GOTV turfs wear a badge on the Canvassing list so you can tell the outings apart.

Persuasion turfs get row-level quick taps too — Supporter, Undecided, Non-supporter, Not home — so the common outcomes are recorded without opening the door screen. On a door with several residents the tap records the household’s stance and the confirmation says so; open the door to record each person. The buttons disappear once a door is attempted. Every row shows who lives there, the address, and who last visited ("Julie L. spoke to someone here 1 day ago"), so nobody re-knocks a door a teammate finished an hour ago.

Delivery outings: signs and flyers as turfs

A turf cut in delivery mode takes its doors from the approved delivery requests pool rather than a list. Cutting one claims those requests — they leave the pool and the planning screens, so two outings can never be sent to the same lawn — and each request shows which outing is carrying it. Declining a request mid-outing takes its door off the volunteer’s list and frees nothing else; retiring the outing returns its undelivered requests to the pool. Refresh doors from the request pool (in the turf’s row menu) pulls in requests approved after the cut and drops doors whose requests were pulled back; doors already delivered stay put. Delivery outings default to by car, so the doors come in a driving order. On the volunteer’s phone each door offers Delivered, Couldn’t deliver (with a reason the office sees on the request), and Navigate; a signs-and-flyers outing serves both requests at a door in one tap, and everything works offline like any other turf.

What the badge on a turf means

• Needs canvassers: cut and ready to walk, but nobody is on it yet.
• Links sent: its canvassers have their personal Companion links. No knocks logged yet.
• Knocking now: a knock was logged on this turf in the last few hours.
• Every door knocked: every door in the turf has been tried at least once.
• Retired: closed to new knocks. Everything it collected stays in the field report.

Nothing here is a setting you switch. Each badge is worked out from the knocks that have actually come in, so a turf tells you the truth about itself without anyone remembering to update it.

Open a turf

Click a turf’s name — in the list, or its pin on the map — to open it. The turf page is where you see what is actually happening on the ground: a map of its doors (green where a volunteer had a conversation, amber where they knocked and nobody answered, grey where nobody has been yet) inside the turf’s dashed boundary, everyone walking it with the doors and conversations credited to each of them, and then every door in walk order with who lives there, what the last visit recorded, which canvasser recorded it, and when. The door list and map now follow the same suggested walking order, with numbered pins marking the route up one side of the street and back down the other. Filter the door list to talked, knocked-no-answer, or not-yet to see what is left. Addresses link to the household and names to the person, so a doorstep note is one click from the record it belongs to. Managing canvassers, the join QR, refreshing from the list, and retiring the turf are all here too, alongside the turf’s activity log.

Turfs arrive from the cutter with generated names, and the first thing worth doing is calling them what your organizers call them. Rename turf — in a turf’s ⋯ menu on the list, or the pencil beside the name on the turf page — changes it everywhere at once: canvassers already walking it see the new name the next time their Companion refreshes, and the field report files it under the new name too. Nothing else moves. Its doors, the knocks already logged and every link you have handed out all keep working, and the rename itself is recorded in the turf’s activity log with who did it.

Put canvassers on a turf

Add canvassers opens the turf’s roster. Search for people and add as many as you like at once, because a turf holds a whole group walking it together, not one person. Everyone you add gets their own personal Companion link, sent to them automatically by email and text (whichever contacts their person record has on file). Links are personal on purpose: each volunteer proves it’s them with a one-time code sent to their own email or mobile, and a brand-new volunteer needs a one-time admin approval on the Volunteer access page before the turf loads. Remove someone from the roster and their link stops working immediately, while everyone else keeps walking and the doors they already knocked stay credited to them.

By default a canvasser can also pick their own turf. Once they’re on at least one turf in a campaign, the Companion shows them every other turf in that campaign — nearest first if they let the phone share its location — so they can start on an unclaimed one or join a turf someone else is already walking, and switch between turfs mid-shift without you sending anything. If you would rather place every canvasser by hand, set Which turfs a canvasser can see to “Only turfs you assign them” in Settings → Companion Apps. You can also override it for one person from the Volunteer access page.

Keeping a turf in step with its list

A list keeps moving after you cut from it: people are added, people move away, a smart list re-decides who belongs. Refresh doors from list, in a turf’s ⋯ menu or on the turf page, re-reads the list and brings the turf back in line. Doors still in the list are left exactly as they are, new addresses in the list that fall inside the turf’s own boundary are added, and doors that have left the list come off the turf. Knocks already logged are kept either way, so nothing disappears from the field report. The app tells you the count both ways before and after.

Print a paper walk map

Print walk map, in a turf’s ⋯ menu on the list or on the turf page, opens a printable walk sheet for that turf. The page has a header with the turf’s facts, a street map with a numbered dot for each door and a dashed line through the suggested route (door positions are approximate; without a Google Maps key the sheet falls back to a plain schematic with street names), and the full door list in walking order with blank Result and Notes columns for recording in pencil. A QR code on the sheet lets a volunteer with a phone scan it and join the same turf in the app.

Printing partway through a campaign shows which doors are already done, so a paper round picks up where the app left off instead of retreading finished ground.

Sign volunteers up on the spot with a QR code

Everything above assumes the volunteer is already in your database. For the five people who turned up at the launch and aren’t, use a join code. On the Volunteer access page, Join by QR gives you a QR code and an eight-character code to go with it — show it on your phone, project it, or print it on the sign-in sheet. Someone scans it, types their name and one contact, gets a one-time code to prove that contact is theirs, and lands in your approval queue. If they are already in your rolodex we match them rather than making a second copy; if they aren’t, we create them with volunteer status Prospective so you can tidy them up later.

The eight-character code under the QR is not decoration — it is the way in for the phone whose camera won’t focus. Opening the companion app’s address on its own (go.pplcrm.com in production) asks for that code and then runs exactly the same sign-up. Read it out; the field ignores spaces, dashes, and case.

A turf can have its own QR too — Show join QR in a turf’s ⋯ menu. Everyone who scans that one lands on that turf, which is how you get a group walking together off one poster. The campaign-wide code on Volunteer access drops people on the turf picker instead. Either way nobody sees a single door until you approve them: Rotate code mints a replacement and kills the old one instantly, so anything already printed stops working.

Approve from your phone

If you are the one running the launch, Send to my phone on the Join by QR panel texts you the whole thing on one page: the QR blown up to hold across a room, the eight-character code under it, and everyone who has scanned it waiting, with Approve next to each name. The list refreshes itself while you stand there. That link only ever goes to the mobile on your own profile (set it under Mobile number on your profile — the panel offers you the link if there is none on file), it only reaches the people who scanned that one code, and it stops working after twelve hours or the moment you rotate the code — whichever comes first.

Approving from the Volunteer access page always works. But when you are the one who invited someone — you assigned them a turf, or you created the join code they scanned — we can also text you a link that approves them in one tap. It shows who is asking and what they’d be joining before you decide, and it expires after three days. It’s on by default — an unapproved volunteer is standing at a door unable to work, and a text is the fastest way to unblock them — but it only ever reaches you if your profile has a mobile number (Mobile number on your profile), and you can switch it off from the Volunteer waiting for approval row in your notification settings. Email and in-app alerts go out either way.

The Canvass Companion

The Companion is a web app, nothing to install. After verifying, the volunteer lands on their assignment, taps Start walking, and works the door list in the suggested walk order (any order works). Each row shows who lives there by full name — with a shared surname said once, so “Heather & Ross Gagnon” rather than the surname twice — plus a small people count, so a full house reads as one before the knock even when the names are cut short on a narrow screen. Tapping a row unfolds the common outcomes as one-tap buttons — Supporter, Undecided, Non-supporter, Not home — with an Open this door link to the full door screen, so a walk list stays compact until a door needs attention. On the door screen they survey the people on file (support level, top issues, follow-up flags, and notes) or record a one-tap result like not home or moved. There is no save button — every answer is saved the moment it is tapped, and the visit syncs as one record when the volunteer moves on. Door-level outcomes (nobody home, inaccessible, refused, moved out) close a door with one tap and can be cleared just as fast, and “+ Add someone at this door” captures a new name on the spot. One recorded answer resolves the door — canvassers talk to whoever answers, so nobody has to survey every name on file before moving on. A conversation marks the door Canvassed; a one-tap result for one person (not home, moved, refused) marks it Visited. Either way the door counts as attempted and leaves the Remaining filter, and the other residents keep their open state on the door screen for a later pass. Every result syncs live to the person, the household, the turf’s progress, and the Activity log, attributed honestly as “via Canvass Companion”. No signal? Results queue on the phone and upload automatically when the volunteer is back online.

The Companion works one street at a time. A turf is a neighbourhood; a shift is a street. It opens already narrowed to the street holding the volunteer’s next unknocked door, and the bar above the door list names it. Tapping that bar opens the street picker: every street in the turf, nearest first once the phone shares its location and in walk order otherwise, each with its own progress. There is no “all doors” option — nothing is hidden by that, because every street is in the list (including one bucket for doors with no street on file) and the whole turf’s total is stated underneath. Within a street, an Odd / Even toggle under the filters narrows the list to one side of the street — house numbers are odd on one side and even on the other, and that is how streets are actually walked. It appears only when the street genuinely has two numbered sides, doors whose numbers can’t be read stay visible on both, and when one side is finished the list offers Switch to the other side before suggesting the next street. The progress bar tracks exactly what is in view — “6 of 9 doors attempted on the odd side of James Street” — with the turf’s own count on the line below, so a finished street never reads as a finished turf.

Rows carry what a canvasser needs before they knock. A coloured left edge and a thumb say where the door stands — green thumbs-up for a supporter, red thumbs-down for someone against, an amber question mark for undecided, and an amber group icon when the people at one door disagree. That reading comes from whatever the CRM already knows, from any source, so a turf is useful on its first morning rather than only after your own team has knocked it. A yard-sign icon means somebody there is already owed a sign, and a green check means somebody there has already voted. Doors nobody has ever ID’d carry no mark at all — an icon on every row would say nothing while competing with the ones that do.

The Map tab opens a walking view of the street. Yellow pins are doors still to walk, green is done, blue is knocked with nobody home, and red is do not contact; one pin is highlighted as the next door. Yellow pins carry a number, following a suggested order that walks up one side of the street by house number and back down the other, and a dashed line runs through the remaining doors, shrinking as each one is finished. Find me on the map shows the volunteer’s own position as a blue dot; it asks for location only when tapped, never on its own, and Center on me re-frames the map on that position afterward. A Results toggle switches the pins to the same support-reading colors the walk list rows use: green for a supporter, red for someone against, amber for undecided. The map shows the same doors the list does — narrowing to the odd or even side narrows the pins and the dashed line too. Once every door in view is done, the map says so and offers the other side of the street if it still has doors, or Pick the next street.

Opening a door adds one more line at the top: whether anyone has canvassed that house recently, who it was, and how long ago — “Julie L. spoke to someone here 1 day ago”, or “Julie L. tried this door 2 hours ago” when they knocked and nobody answered. It counts visits from every turf in the same campaign, not just the turf in hand, so a street two turfs overlap on, or a second pass a fortnight later, still shows up. A visit the volunteer logged themselves reads “You”. Anything older than 30 days is not mentioned at all, and a door nobody has been to says nothing.

Apartments fold into their building. Forty flats at 58 Huron Avenue arrive as forty households sharing one street address, so the walk list shows one row — “58 Huron Avenue N · 40 units · 3 attempted” — that opens into the unit list. Units are ordered the way a hallway runs (101, 102, then 1003, with lettered units like PH2 last), and each one behaves exactly like a door on a street. A building only counts as done when every unit in it does.

When a group is splitting one turf, the street picker also shows who has taken what — “Dana is here” next to a street someone else picked. It’s a note to the group, never a lock: any volunteer can still take any street, and nothing stops a knock. Streets are handed back automatically when someone picks a different one, switches turfs, or ends their shift.

Because several people can walk one turf at once, the door list re-checks itself about once a minute and says how fresh it is (“Updated just now”). Tap that line to update immediately. It means a door someone else just knocked shows up as knocked instead of being knocked twice — and anything the volunteer recorded but hasn’t synced yet is kept, not overwritten.

End shift on this device, on the volunteer’s Me tab, signs that phone out: the device session is revoked, so the phone has to verify a fresh one-time code before it can see the turf again. Worth doing on a shared or borrowed phone, and worth knowing before doing it on a personal one. It syncs anything still waiting first, and if something genuinely cannot be sent it says how much will be lost before you confirm. A volunteer who ends a shift by mistake is not locked out — their turf assignment is untouched, and they verify a code and carry on.

Occasionally a result cannot be sent — the turf’s door list changed while the phone was offline, for instance, so the household it names is no longer part of the turf. The Companion never deletes that result. A red bar appears at the top of every screen saying how many results couldn’t sync, and the Me tab lists each one by name with the reason. Try again re-sends the ones a retry could still fix (useful right after you refresh a turf’s doors from its list), and Discard this one removes a result the volunteer decides is not worth keeping. Nothing on that list has reached the CRM, so it is worth clearing before the phone is put away.

Survey answers do real work: a support level updates the person’s support reading for the turf’s campaign, Wants a yard sign drops a request straight into the delivery Requests tab, Wants to volunteer sets their volunteer status to Prospective on the person record, 65 or older records their age band on the person record so you can build a seniors list, contact details fill in blanks on the person record, and Do not contact suppresses them everywhere, immediately.

A canvasser carrying signs can also deliver one at the door. When a household has asked for a sign, the door screen says so and offers I delivered the sign; tapping it records the same “delivered” status a delivery outing would record, so the request stops showing as owed everywhere — including on a delivery outing that was carrying it, where the door shows as already served. Undo on the same card puts the sign back on the list.

For somebody who asks for a sign and is handed one on the spot, the survey does both in one step: tick Wants a yard sign and the line underneath it, I gave them one just now. That creates the request and marks it delivered together, so there is no second step to forget and nothing to wait for a signal to sync. The line is hidden on a door whose sign has already been delivered — a sign cannot arrive twice.

A canvasser also meets things that are wrong with the record itself, and the bottom of the survey is where those go. Deceased stamps the date on the person record and stops all contact immediately — one more letter to someone who has died is the worst thing a campaign’s data can do, so it does not wait for review. Error in data asks what is wrong and opens a task for the campaign admin with the volunteer’s own words; it changes nothing about the person, because “this is wrong” is a report, not a diagnosis. Both sit at the end behind a confirmation rather than in the quick-code row at the top, so neither is one mis-tap away from the most-tapped buttons on the screen. One open review task per person — a family of four at a wrong address does not become four identical tasks.

Both facts are visible and editable on the person record, under At the door in the standing card: the senior band as a three-way choice (65 or older / under 65 / not recorded — “not recorded” is a real answer, because nobody has asked), and the deceased mark with the date it was recorded. Undoing a deceased mark restores the record but deliberately leaves do-not-contact in place. Both are filters in the smart-list rule builder as Senior (65+) and Deceased.

Survey settings (top of the Canvassing page) controls what canvassers see: the top-issues chips they can tag and the door script that opens every survey, both scoped to the campaign the turf was cut for. The same dialog holds Live location detail — whether the Live tab shows street-level dots and paths, or only who is on which turf.

The Live tab: where the crew is right now

The Live tab (admins and owners only) answers where the crew is right now. While a volunteer walks a turf, their Companion shares its position with the campaign once a minute. The tab shows one pin per turf coloured by status, a violet dot for each canvasser out now, and a shift board: one row per canvasser with their turf, when they were last heard from, doors so far, and a knock tape — a strip showing when their knocks landed, so steady work and a forty-minute gap both read at a glance. Selecting a row rings that canvasser on the map and opens a street-level panel with their path so far today against the turf’s doors, which is how “did the route actually get walked” gets answered. Canvassers who finished earlier appear under Wrapped up today with their end times, so an absent volunteer reads as finished rather than missing.

• Positions exist only during a shift. A shift opens when the Companion starts reporting and closes when the volunteer taps End shift, after 30 minutes with no activity (shown ending at their last activity, not the timeout), or at midnight. A closed shift shows an end time and totals, never a position.
• Coordinates are deleted every night. Only the day’s totals survive: when the shift ran, doors knocked, distance walked.
• The volunteer always knows. The Companion shows a “Sharing your location with the campaign” banner for the whole shift, and confirms when sharing stops. A volunteer who declines location still appears on the board — their row says “Location off” and their knocks and door counts work as usual.
• Canvassers never see each other’s positions. The Live tab, and the matching blocks on the person record and the turf page, are visible to admins and owners only.
• Turf-level mode. Set Live location detail to turf level in Survey settings and the CRM is only ever sent who is on which turf — no dots, no paths.

The tab is deliberately read-only: it reports and links out to the canvasser’s record and their turf, and nothing more. Turfs with nobody on them are named in the amber block beside the map along with who is nearest — the acting happens in Turfs & assignments, where the assignment tools live. The same live picture appears in two more places: a person record shows an OUT NOW pill with today’s map and figures while that person’s shift is open, and a turf page shows SOMEONE ON IT NOW with each walker’s last-seen time.

The field report

The Field report tab turns those knocks into the picture of the operation: doors, conversations, contact rate and support IDs; what voters said at the door; doors knocked per day; performance by team; when doors answer best; and your top canvassers. Change the range or Export CSV for the raw numbers by team and by day. Every figure flows in from synced Companions. Nothing is entered by hand.

The Coverage card shows where you have actually walked. Flip to the By area tab for the picture as a table: doors, how much of each area has been knocked, and how many are still waiting. That tab is named with your campaign’s own word — By ward, By riding, By precinct — from the office it is running for (see What office a campaign is running for), and doors that fall in no area are grouped under Unbounded. Like the rest of the report it follows the range you pick, and it appears as soon as turfs are cut, even before the first knock.

Reading the Street map

The Street map shows one of two things, and it says underneath which one you are looking at. Which you get depends only on how many doors are inside the part of the map on screen.

• Zoomed out, or any view holding more than 2,000 doors — each turf is shaded by how much of it has been knocked: grey for not started, amber for under half, blue for half or more, green for 90% or more. Those percentages count every door in the turf, not just the ones on screen, and they count every door that was knocked at all — a door where nobody came was still walked. So the shading is exact, not a sample.
• Zoomed in past that — the individual doors come back, one dot each: green where a volunteer had a conversation, amber where they knocked and got no answer, grey where no one has been yet.

Turf outlines are drawn dashed at both zooms, and clicking one opens that turf. The dashes are not decoration: the outline is drawn around the turf’s own doors rather than along a real boundary, so it is the right shape for finding a turf and the wrong shape for reading a border off.