Your first 30 days

What to do, in what order, when the account is new and nobody has knocked a door yet. Work down the list – each week assumes the one before it.

Week one: get the ground under you

Set up the organisation. Name, logo and brand colours. This is not vanity: the volunteer sign-up page, the canvasser app and the action pages all wear your branding, and a supporter who lands on a page that looks like your campaign trusts it more than one that looks like a vendor's.

Get two other people in. Working alone in a new tool teaches you nothing about whether it fits your team. Invite a co-organiser and someone who will do data, and set their roles properly from the start. See Team, roles and access.

Look at the map before you import anything. The Australian civic data is already loaded – G-NAF addresses, ASGS geography, electoral divisions at every level, demographics. Spend an hour with your electorate on screen. You will make better decisions in week two for having done it.

Do not import your list yet. Almost everyone imports on day one, discovers the fields are wrong, and lives with a messy audience for a year. Wait until week two.

Week two: bring your data in

Clean the export first, outside the platform. One row per person, a consistent phone format, and a column that tells you where each record came from. Fix it in the spreadsheet – it is far cheaper than fixing it after import.

Import in one batch, then check three things: the row count matches, a random ten records look right, and the duplicates you expected to merge actually merged.

Build your first two segments, not twenty. Start with the two you will actually use this month – usually "people who have said yes to something" and "people in the target area". See Audiences and segments.

Week three: run something small

The goal this week is a complete loop at small scale, not a big result.

Cut one turf of about 120 doors, in a suburb you know.
Build a three-question survey. See Building a branching survey.
Run one shift with four volunteers, including yourself. Knock the doors personally – you will learn more in two hours than in a week of configuration.
Read the results the same day. Contact rate, support distribution, and whether the dispositions your volunteers chose match what they told you happened.

The point is to find the friction while it is cheap. Something will be wrong – a disposition nobody used, a question that confused people, a turf that took twice as long as you thought.

Week four: fix it and set the cadence

Change the things week three exposed. Then set the rhythm you will actually keep:

A standing shift in the calendar, same time each week.
A named person who reads the results every week.
A target with a date, so pace means something.

Set one target, publicly. A number and a date, visible to the team. Pace against a target is the difference between a program and a series of activities. See Reading your results.

What good looks like at day 30

Three or more people using the platform, with the right access.
A clean audience you trust, and two segments you use.
One completed canvass with data you would show someone.
One target with a pace you are tracking against.
A weekly rhythm that survives you being busy.

Not: every feature configured. Most of the platform should still be unexplored at day 30, and that is correct.