You don't have a voter file. You have volunteers and a map.
uprise cuts turf from Australian electoral boundaries and the national address file, routes it onto a canvasser's phone, and keeps recording knocks when that phone loses signal in a stairwell. The doors build the supporter file as you go.
Trusted by progressive Australian campaigns, nonprofits, and causes
Why community independents choose uprise
You don't need a supporter list to start
Load a turf from the national geocoded address file and every address becomes a knockable door. The first knock creates the record; the campaign's file is a by-product of field work rather than a prerequisite for it.
Turf from official Australian geography
Draw a boundary on the map or build it from a federal division, a state electorate, statistical areas or meshblocks, with live address counts as you go. Turf cutting is clipped to the boundary you set.
Volunteers get a route, not a spreadsheet
Each turf becomes a route-ordered walk list on the canvasser's phone, with a cached door count and walking-time estimate, and the on-map walking line following footpaths instead of straight lines.
Volunteers can claim their own street
Turn on self-serve turf and a volunteer picks a statistical area, draws their own patch or takes an unassigned turf – landing as an instant assignment or as a request an organiser approves, per campaign.
Volunteers text without the campaign account
Peer-to-peer texting gives each volunteer their own claimed batch and their own conversations, with scripts, canned replies and dispositions. They press send themselves and never reach the campaign-wide inbox.
Built here, for seats contested here
Federal divisions, both state houses, LGAs and wards, polling places, past election and 2023 referendum results ship with the product. Nothing to remap from an American voter-file model.
What you get on day one
Every one of these is built and shipping today. Nothing on this page is a roadmap item.
Canvass campaigns with a real boundary
A campaign carries its channel, script, survey and pace-to-target goals over an editable boundary built as a union of divisions, statistical areas, meshblocks and hand-drawn polygons, each source re-editable later.
The field app volunteers install
An installable phone app for turf, doors, scripts, surveys, shifts and texting. Knocks, photos and added household members are written to an on-device queue first and flushed in order when signal returns.
Shifts, team leaders and attendance
Shifts with a time, place, team leader and assigned turf; volunteer self-sign-up and release; an approve or deny queue where you want one; attendance recorded per assignment, and one calendar over shifts and events.
One survey, at the door and over SMS
Branching surveys where each answer can map to a disposition, a five-point support level from strong support to strong oppose, and a canned reply. The same instrument runs at the doorstep and in a texting session, so a first-time canvasser on their first shift reads the same wording as the volunteer texting from home.
Saved searches that re-evaluate
Audience definitions over a closed vocabulary of twenty-eight authorable conditions, with a live count that runs the same evaluation the send runs, and consent, suppression and reachability enforced beneath them as system-owned floors an author cannot reach. "Knocked in the last fortnight and still undecided" is a definition your organiser re-opens on Saturday morning, not a spreadsheet somebody re-cuts.
Start from the doors, not from a database you don't have
Most tools in this market assume you arrive with a file. A first-time community campaign arrives with a seat, a candidate and a list of people who came to a town hall. uprise is built the other way around: the address universe is the starting point, and the file fills in as knocks, texts and RSVPs accumulate.
- Load a turf from the national address file and every address in it becomes a knockable cold door, with no supporter list required to begin.
- One row per phone number and one per normalised address, enforced by a database constraint rather than by a tidy-up job, so a street knocked twice does not become two files. What a constraint cannot do is recognise that the mobile who signed up at the town hall is the door your crew knocked on Saturday: that is two rows until somebody asks us to merge them, and there is no merge screen or duplicate queue in the product.
- Contacts pulled from a connected nation are resolved on email or phone and grouped under one canonical record with no row deleted, so one person stays traceable back to every source they arrived from.
- Bring what you already have: a CSV import that reports errors row by row and resumes from where it stopped, or a pull from a NationBuilder list or tag, or an Action Network list.
- Where it stops, plainly: every location filter, postcode and locality and state included alongside division, SA1 to SA4, LGA and ward, answers through the address-file link uprise stamps on a contact it created itself. An imported address is stored on the record but never matched back, so an imported contact answers none of them.
- 1Load a turf from the national address file and every address in it becomes a knockable cold door, with no supporter list required to begin.
- 2One row per phone number and one per normalised address, enforced by a database constraint rather than by a tidy-up job, so a street knocked twice does not become two files. What a constraint cannot do is recognise that the mobile who signed up at the town hall is the door your crew knocked on Saturday: that is two rows until somebody asks us to merge them, and there is no merge screen or duplicate queue in the product.
- 3Contacts pulled from a connected nation are resolved on email or phone and grouped under one canonical record with no row deleted, so one person stays traceable back to every source they arrived from.
Where to knock on Saturday, with the volunteers you actually have
Volunteer hours are the scarcest thing a community campaign has, and they are spent in blocks that cannot be taken back. The targeting map exists to answer one question honestly: of the areas in this seat, which one should the crew meeting at 9am walk, and how confident are we about that.
- A per-SA1 score over nine factors – knockable doors, persuadability, supporter density, demographic fit, efficiency, freshness, plus optional community, progressive and informality lenses – under persuasion, turnout and coverage presets, with weights you can move. The three optional lenses sit at zero weight in every preset until you move their slider, so six factors are doing the work unless you decide otherwise.
- A multiplicative door gate, so an area with nothing knockable scores near zero however persuadable it looks and never climbs the ranking. It stays a score rather than a lock: nothing stops you sending a crew wherever you judge is right.
- Where the inputs are thin the cell scores null and stays unpainted. uprise says it does not know rather than colouring an unknown area cold, and missing factors drop out of the calculation instead of being guessed at.
- ABS Census 2021 and SEIFA 2021 indicators as a choropleth under the turf you are cutting, at SA2 to SA4 and baked onto the map tile at SA1 and meshblock.
- Evaluation mode: pair-matched SA1 cluster randomisation with a power preview before you commit, then an assignment that is frozen once field work exists, so what the doorknock changed can be read against a genuine holdout.
- 1A per-SA1 score over nine factors – knockable doors, persuadability, supporter density, demographic fit, efficiency, freshness, plus optional community, progressive and informality lenses – under persuasion, turnout and coverage presets, with weights you can move. The three optional lenses sit at zero weight in every preset until you move their slider, so six factors are doing the work unless you decide otherwise.
- 2A multiplicative door gate, so an area with nothing knockable scores near zero however persuadable it looks and never climbs the ranking. It stays a score rather than a lock: nothing stops you sending a crew wherever you judge is right.
- 3Where the inputs are thin the cell scores null and stays unpainted. uprise says it does not know rather than colouring an unknown area cold, and missing factors drop out of the calculation instead of being guessed at.
A handful of staff, a very large number of volunteers
The constraint in these campaigns is rarely enthusiasm. It is the two or three people who have to allocate it, chase it, and make sure nobody gets sent to a door someone knocked yesterday. uprise pushes as much of that as it safely can onto the volunteers themselves, and keeps the parts that need judgement in an approval queue.
- Volunteer self-serve turf: they browse claimable work and take it by picking a statistical area, drawing a polygon or claiming an unassigned turf, as an instant assignment or a request you approve.
- The field app writes each knock, photo and added household member to an on-device outbox before anything else and flushes it in order on reconnect, so a basement carpark costs you no data. A re-synced knock is deduplicated server-side on its client-generated id; a photo or an added household member is not, so the queue's single-flush lock is what keeps those from arriving twice.
- Peer-to-peer texting is scoped to the volunteer in the service layer, not just hidden in the interface: they claim a batch, send one at a time and reply only in conversations they own, while organisers and owners see everything for oversight.
- One shared inbox where claiming a conversation puts your name on it, so the next organiser can see it is being handled. That is visible ownership rather than a lock – an organiser can still reply to a thread somebody else claimed – while an inbound STOP writes an opt-out straight to the consent ledger.
- Volunteer permissions are an explicit list of resources rather than a wildcard over a domain, so a new part of the product cannot quietly turn up inside a volunteer's account.
- 1Volunteer self-serve turf: they browse claimable work and take it by picking a statistical area, drawing a polygon or claiming an unassigned turf, as an instant assignment or a request you approve.
- 2The field app writes each knock, photo and added household member to an on-device outbox before anything else and flushes it in order on reconnect, so a basement carpark costs you no data. A re-synced knock is deduplicated server-side on its client-generated id; a photo or an added household member is not, so the queue's single-flush lock is what keeps those from arriving twice.
- 3Peer-to-peer texting is scoped to the volunteer in the service layer, not just hidden in the interface: they claim a batch, send one at a time and reply only in conversations they own, while organisers and owners see everything for oversight.
Built for every community independent model
A first federal run
Build the boundary from the division, load the address file into turf, and start knocking in week one. Support level and dispositions accumulate against a goal with weekly pace, so the count you report to your committee is the count the doors produced.
A state seat on a shorter clock
State electorates ship as separate lower and upper house layers, alongside LGAs and council wards, so the boundary matches whatever you are contesting. The same turf, walk list, survey and texting machinery applies without reconfiguration.
A sitting independent between campaigns
Keep the seat warm rather than rebuilding every three years: events with public RSVP and door check-in, surveys over SMS, a shared inbox for constituent messages, and a browser softphone for calls from the office number with recordings and history.
Questions we get asked
The things community independents ask before they switch. If yours is not here, ask us directly.
No, and it is not planned – our comparison page marks it a deliberate decision to stay out of that lane. There is no supporter-facing page for contributing, no receipting for contributions and no ticketed events. The Stripe code inside uprise exists to bill your campaign for its own uprise subscription and nothing else. Keep whatever platform you already use for that side of the campaign; uprise carries the field, list and messaging work.
No. A blast in uprise is SMS – the channel type has no email member, so there is no campaign email product to grow into. What exists is transactional email: invitations, sign-in links, verification, and the event-reminder mail when something triggers it, since no timer runs it for you. Each is wrapped in your logo and colours, with the open, the click and any bounce reason recorded against the message. There is no searchable email log yet, so the record exists and the screen for browsing it does not. Keep your newsletter tool and let uprise handle the doorstep and the phone.
No, and you should expect to run both for a while. Connect the nation once, search and sample its lists and tags, and pull a list or a tag into an uprise audience with checkpointed pagination and a re-pull on a schedule – daily as it comes, and hourly if you tighten it; Action Network lists work the same way. Pushing results back the other way is built for both, but it is switched off and no plan grants it today, so what uprise learns at the door does not yet flow back into your nation. You would export it or work in both.
Only partly, and it is important you know which part. Hard-enforced at send: an opted-out contact is skipped, the skips are counted and logged, and your suppression list is applied inside the audience evaluation as a floor nobody can author away. Advisory only: uprise warns when the message body has no "Reply STOP" wording and when the send falls inside the quiet-hours window, and neither warning blocks a send. That window is a platform-wide setting rather than something your campaign sets, so treat it as a prompt to think, not as your compliance calendar. There is no authorisation-statement field and nothing inserts one for you – that wording is yours to write and yours to get right.
Not today, and we would rather say so than let you build a phone bank around it. The browser softphone is for organisers and owners: dial from the workspace number with call history, recordings and per-call stats. Volunteers hold no calling permission and the field app has no dialler, so their phone channel is peer-to-peer texting. On the Scale plan the autodialer runs voice broadcasts, an IVR robo-poll over a question graph, and transfers matched to the answerer's own federal or state member – but it is a broadcast dialler, not predictive, and it never connects a live volunteer to an answered call.
Each campaign is an isolated workspace with its own contacts, team and settings, on its own subdomain at your-campaign.uprise.org.au, branded with your logos, colours and custom CSS across the volunteer join pages, event pages and action pages. Your own domain is not live yet – the panel in the product says so rather than pretending. Exports today are two fixed CSVs: an audience's contacts, and an event's RSVPs. There is no report builder, no scheduled export and no warehouse mirror, so if you need something else out of it, ask us and we will get it out for you.
Grassroots is a philanthropically funded licence: you apply, we assess, and where we grant it we carry the cost. It is not the whole product, and the allowances matter more than the price. The paid-channel set is out – the autodialer, click-to-call action pages, and sending from your own campaign number, all of which sit on Scale; on Grassroots your SMS still sends, from the shared platform number instead of one of yours. The licence as it stands is sized at a thousand contacts, two saved audiences and two workspace seats. The seat count is the one the product enforces: the check runs the moment somebody joins, a volunteer occupies a seat exactly as an organiser does, and on those numbers the third person you onboard is refused. The thousand contacts and two audiences are what the licence is sized around rather than a line the product stops an import at. That makes the size of your field team the first thing to tell us about, because it is the part the licence has to be sized around rather than something to discover in week three.
See it on the seat you are contesting
Bring the division or state electorate to the demo and we will build its boundary, cut turf inside it and put a walk list on a phone while you watch. If uprise is missing something your campaign needs, we will tell you on the call.