Turf and walk lists
Turf is the unit of field work. Cut it well and volunteers spend their time talking; cut it badly and they spend it walking, guessing, and doubling back.
Size turf to a shift, not to a suburb
The most common mistake is cutting turf around a boundary that means something to you – a suburb, a booth catchment – rather than around what a pair can finish in one shift.
A useful starting point: 120–150 doors is about three hours for a pair who actually stop and talk. Adjust for your own contact rate after the first weekend, and adjust down for:
- Apartment blocks, where access and lifts eat time.
- Rural or large-block streets, where the walking dominates.
- First-timers, who are slower and should be.
Watch the live address-count estimate as you draw. It is there so you know how big a bite you are taking before you commit volunteers to it.
Cut from the map or from geography
Two ways in, and they suit different moments:
- From the map when you are working to a real-world shape – one side of a main road, the streets around a school, the blocks you know are winnable.
- From geographic areas when you are working to a defined boundary – an electoral division, a statistical area, a booth catchment.
Because the addresses underneath are G-NAF, what you cut is real doors, not an approximation. That is what makes the count trustworthy.
Optimise the walk, and let volunteers re-optimise
Walk lists are built on real walking metrics and grouped by street, so the route makes sense on foot rather than on a straight-line map. They are re-optimisable on demand – which matters because plans change mid-shift.
A volunteer who has skipped a block, been given extra doors, or lost an hour can re-order their remaining addresses into the shortest sensible walk. That happens on the device, with no network call, so it works in exactly the places where coverage is worst. See Running a doorknock weekend.
Assign and reassign without ceremony
Turf assignment should be light. People do not turn up, shifts run long, a pair finishes early. Reassign as the day goes – unassigned turf is not a plan, it is a gap you have not noticed yet.
Two habits worth keeping:
- Assign turf to a pair, not an individual. Pairs are safer, faster to train, and more likely to finish.
- Never reassign a turf that is half-done without recording that it is half-done. Otherwise your coverage data quietly double-counts.
Coverage is a number you should be able to say out loud
At any point in a campaign you should be able to answer: what percentage of the target universe has been attempted, and what percentage has been contacted. If you cannot, your turf is not being tracked properly, and every claim you make about the electorate rests on nothing.
Attempted and contacted are different numbers, and the gap between them is your contact rate – see Reading your results.
Recut around what you learn
The whole point of tracking coverage is that it changes where you go next. After each weekend:
- Retire streets that came back solidly opposed. That is a win – it frees hours.
- Recut toward higher-density areas if you are behind pace.
- Return to the streets with high contact rates and unresolved conversations. Those are the doors that move.
Common failure modes
- Turf that crosses a barrier. A river, a freeway or a railway line in the middle of a walk list adds an hour nobody planned for.
- The same turf walked twice. Usually caused by reassigning without recording, or by two organisers cutting overlapping shapes.
- Turf nobody wants. The high-rise that "never works". It works – the app queues offline. Assign it to your most experienced pair once and the myth dies.