At Ecanvasser, we think of campaigning and canvassing in the same way you do. You want to extract as much information from a canvass as easily as possible so you can take action on your learnings, right? That's why we are always focused on doing as much canvassing as possible, sometimes even recanvassing the same area twice.

Canvass a certain area of your community in the first week of your outreach and canvass that same area again in the lead up to polling day, perhaps for a GOTV operation. We distinguish these canvasses by calling them canvassing efforts.

Canvassing Efforts

Canvassing efforts is the way we talk about the many different canvassing operations you may undertake in the same area. For example, think of it like Canvass Effort 1, Canvass Effort 2 & Canvass Effort GOTV. Ecanvasser developed "Canvassing Efforts" to address a few different scenarios we have seen cropping up again and again:

Engaging in two or more parallel types of voter interaction, and need to distinguish between whether someone had been contacted in a particular way verses another.

Or...

Need to archive a past canvass round while retaining key information such as; who was engaged, and who can you recruit to your campaign as a more active volunteer now. We refer to each round of engagement as a "Canvassing Effort".

The First Effort

When you start your Ecanvasser campaign, you automatically have one canvassing effort in progress. If you wish to create a new Effort, you can do so from your Campaign Settings, accessible from your Campaign Homepage:

Note: It's important to understand what an Effort consists of. Your database itself exists in the same state (i.e. same voters living in the same houses) across all of your efforts, and data points such as Contact Details and Custom Fields hold the same values across all Efforts.

Managing Your Efforts

Under Canvassing Efforts you will have the option to:

1. Create a new Canvassing Effort
2. Edit a Canvassing Effort's name
3. Archive an individual Canvassing Effort

Create Effort
Once you've selected to do so, you simply need to title the Effort, and select Save. This Effort will immediately become active in the areas of the dashboard and apps discussed later in this document.

Archive or Edit Effort
Editing an Effort will simply allow you to change the name of this record. This is useful if you'd like to update the naming conventions you've used retrospectively.

You might do a few rounds of canvassing one after another, or you might have a few engagements ongoing at the same time; however, once you finish with that round of engagement, you might want to lock those records so that nobody can accidentally change them. You can do that here, and users will not be able to change any Canvass information on this Effort any longer (though you can still review it's data throughout the dashboard on the results tab).

Making Use of Your Efforts
Once you have more than one Effort, you will notice the option to filter between them in multiple places across Ecanvasser.

Looking at the results page will now show you all the results from your various Canvassing Efforts, this cool functionality will allow you to see improvements or perhaps the opposite, over the course of a long campaign. It will also allow you to see different results from different messaging associated with each canvassing Effort.

The potential that comes along with Canvassing Efforts means that you will never be caught off guard during an election again if you maintain steady canvassing and door to door outreach. It allows your campaign team to constantly update information on the issues tab without losing any valuable information due to the beauty of archiving efforts.

Interested in learning more about Canvassing Efforts? Let us know here coriordan@ecanvasser.com