Turn every door knock into a targeting decision

Data you collect and never use is just doors you tired out your volunteers on. The whole point of canvassing is that what you learn on Saturday changes where you knock next Saturday. That loop – knock, score, read, retarget – is the field plan. Here's how to run it in Uprise.

The five-point scale is the spine of everything

Start with how you record a conversation. Uprise lets you define your own dispositions – your own outcome codes, in your own language – but every one of them maps to a single five-point support scale, from STRONG_SUPPORT through to STRONG_OPPOSE.

That combination is the important part. Your volunteers use codes that make sense for your campaign, and the system still knows exactly how supportive each one is. So "rusted on", "leaning our way" and "polite but no" all sort themselves onto the same scale automatically. You get local language on the doorstep and consistent, comparable data underneath. No translation, no arguing about what a "3" means.

Designing dispositions volunteers will actually use

The codes only work if they match the words your team already says. Three rules that hold up:

• Use their language, not yours. If everyone says "not home", the code is "not home" – not "no contact attempt outcome".
• Keep the list short. Eight or nine codes is plenty. Past a dozen, volunteers stop reading the list and default to whatever is at the top, and your distribution quietly becomes an artefact of the ordering.
• Make every code mean one thing. If a volunteer can reasonably choose between two codes for the same conversation, two volunteers will choose differently and your data has noise you cannot see.

Design them once, before the first shift, and leave them alone. Redefining a code mid-campaign makes everything before the change incomparable with everything after it.

Read the results honestly

Once the scores are landing, the results give you three views that, together, keep you honest:

• Disposition breakdown. What actually happened at the doors – the raw outcomes, counted.
• Five-point support distribution. Where your contacts sit on the scale. This is your real support picture, not the one you were hoping for.
• Contact funnel. How many doors turned into conversations, and how many conversations turned into scored contacts. This is where you catch the problem early – a great support number means nothing if your contact rate is quietly collapsing.

The temptation in field work is to read only the number that flatters you. Looking at all three at once stops you doing that.

Contact rate is the early warning

Support numbers move slowly; contact rate moves immediately, and it tells you about your operation rather than about the electorate. Learn to read it:

• Falling across the board? You are knocking at the wrong times. Weekday evenings and weekend mornings are not interchangeable.
• Low on one turf only? It is the turf, not the team – a high-rise, a holiday area, or an address list that has drifted.
• High contact but low completion? People are answering and then the survey is losing them. It is too long.

Whatever your support percentage says, if the contact rate is sliding then your sample is narrowing to the people most willing to talk to you – which is exactly the group most likely to already agree.

Set a pace, not a wish

A target with no pace attached is a wish. Goals in Uprise track pace against target, so you can see whether today's rate actually gets you to the number by the date that matters.

Use it to make real decisions. Behind pace with three weekends left? That's not a moment for optimism, it's a signal to add a shift, recut turf toward higher-density areas, or move volunteers off low-yield lists. The tool tells you where you are against where you need to be, while there's still time to do something about it.

Feed it back into the turf

Here's where the loop closes. What you learned changes where you go.

You can cut fresh turf on the map or straight from geographic areas, with live address-count estimates so you know how big a bite you're taking before you commit volunteers to it. Turn that into optimised walk lists – built on real walking metrics, grouped by street, and re-optimisable on demand – and assign or reassign them as your priorities shift.

And the support data you gathered doesn't just sit in a report. Roll it into audiences and segments, and target the right channel at the right people – the strong supporters you want at an event, the persuadables who deserve another conversation, the opposers you can stop spending volunteer hours on. The scoring you did on the doors becomes the targeting you do next.

The weekly review, in twenty minutes

The loop fails in practice for a boring reason: nobody is named to run it, so it happens when someone remembers. Fix that with a standing twenty minutes, same day each week, same person:

1. Five minutes on the three numbers. Disposition breakdown, support distribution, contact funnel.
2. Five minutes on pace. Are we on track for the number by the date?
3. Ten minutes on three decisions. Where volunteers go next weekend, who gets contacted on another channel, and what the script changes to.

Output three decisions or the review did not happen. A review that ends in "interesting" is a meeting, not a plan. Reading your results walks through the same loop in more detail.

Export and act

When you need the data outside the platform – a coalition partner, a mailing house, a scrutineering plan – the results export straight to CSV. No screenshots, no retyping, no version that only lives in one organiser's head.

The plan is the loop

A field plan isn't a document you write in January and file away. It's a loop you run every week: knock the doors, score each conversation on a scale that means something, read the results without flinching, check your pace, and recut the turf around what you found.

Do that consistently and your program compounds. Every weekend, your list gets sharper, your volunteers spend their time on doors that matter, and your support picture gets more real instead of more hopeful.

That's what winning a field program looks like from the inside – not one heroic weekend, but a loop that keeps tightening. Run the loop.

Read more

• Reading your results – reading a week of field data honestly.
• Turf and walk lists – recutting turf around what you learned.
• Audiences and segments – turning support scores into targeting.
• Running a doorknock weekend – the shift that feeds the loop.