Field actions can be tricky to manage. Between organizing teams of volunteers, equipping them with the correct scripts and surveys, and ensuring that they are familiar with routes, and having a clear and organized feedback, canvassing actions can feel particularly overwhelming to handle. Anything that can make the action organizer’s work easier is therefore incredibly welcome, and at times a necessity. One such tool that has significantly reduced the workload of both volunteers and action organizers is a canvassing app. Canvassing apps operate to lessen some of the more tedious administrative tasks involved in organizing in-the-field actions, thereby making the overall process run much more smoothly and efficiently.
In this article, we’ll be exploring some of the key benefits of using these kinds of mobile apps, and the different ways that it can revolutionize your canvassing action. We’ll be defining exactly what a canvassing app is, examining the advantages it offers to your volunteers in-the-field, and how it can make your life, as an action organizer, infinitely easier!
What is a Canvassing App?
A canvassing app is a digital tool that works to centralize all tasks associated with a canvassing action, from filling out surveys to mapping out canvassing routes. Usually, the app can be used by both volunteers and team managers and organizers and is available for download on IOS and Android phones. With the use of a canvassing app, your entire campaign, NGO, or movement can access what is effectively a digital HQ for your organization at all times from all locations. This improves the quality of communication between your teams, and the efficiency of your canvassing actions too.
Key Advantages of a Canvassing App
Canvassing apps can improve the quality of your volunteers’ canvassing efforts in a number of different ways, including:
- More efficient route management:
Canvassing apps allow you to follow the routes taken by your volunteers, and even update these paths in real time. These updates will then be instantly communicated to your volunteers, thereby allowing for optimum efficiency when following canvassing routes.
- Better file organization:
Canvassing apps allow your volunteers to access all surveys, scripts, contact sheets, and any other documents of relevance to the canvassing action from their mobile devices via the app. This significantly reduces the risk of documents going missing, thereby ensuring that all collected data can be properly utilized.
- Greater clarity on volunteer availability:
Often when organizing teams of volunteers for any form of action, it can be difficult to track the availability of each volunteer. This can make planning particularly tricky, however, with canvassing apps, this hassle is massively reduced; by providing people with a space in which they can log their availability for each action in the mobile app, volunteers are empowered to keep campaign/NGO/movement action organizers informed as to which events they’ll be helping out with. This is both an incredibly easy way for volunteers to communicate this information to you, but is also the easiest way for you to assess whether you need to invite more people to assist you with certain events, whether you need to spread volunteers more evenly across the different actions, etc.
- Improve your Action Analysis:
When you equip volunteers with mobile apps to log their collected data in-the-field, you can instantly access this information and begin analyzing it immediately. This allows you to rapidly alter your campaign, NGO or movement’s messaging in line with the responses recorded. In this way, you can more accurately meet the needs/interests of members of your community.
Whether you’re organizing a canvassing campaign to raise awareness for your NGO, gain votes ahead of election day or are trying to convince more people to donate to your cause, canvassing is one of the best ways of engaging directly with members of your community and conveying your message to them in a personalized manner. Canvassing apps help to make this incredibly powerful method of communicating with your community even more efficient and effective, so why not invest in one today and see the improvements it makes to your volunteers’ canvassing efforts and your management skills? It might be the very making of your organization’s success!
