Best Practices for Canvas Maps

When creating your canvas maps, you should always try and maintain some consistent and great practices to improve your success rate while out in the field.  First, you need to make sure that you are canvassing the right audience. This is usually the hardest part because finding information about all your constituents is very difficult and time consuming. Using APS Sciences services, we can easily get you the people that you need to canvas to. May it be just for getting the votes you need to get to your win number, or one of the many other types or groups of people, APS Sciences has you covered. 

Now that you have your audience group or groups, you need to make the canvas maps. If you are not familiar with what a canvas map is, please refer to What is a Canvas Map? The first thing you want to do is decide on the maximum number of houses you want to visit while you are out canvassing. This is dependent on a multitude of factors like, how physically fit is the person canvassing, what’s the distance between houses, how much time do you want to be spending out in the field, what type of transportation are you using, and many more factors go into how many houses you can visit. A good rule of thumb is to set about 30 houses as a starting point, and then adjust it from there. A rough approximation of time spent at each house is about 5-10 minutes. This is the time that is ringing the doorbell, talking to the person, filling out notes, and this accounts for those houses where they either don’t answer or are not home.

The next step is to ensure that your houses are not too far from each other. If your canvas map is in a rural part of the country, you will most certainly need access to a car or golf cart to get around. If your canvas map is in the suburbs or in a city, then you might be able to walk. Try and account for the time and effort it would take to get there. Depending on what form of transportation either you or your volunteer is using, you will need to limit the maximum range you can travel. Arguably the max range you can travel is more important than the number of houses you can visit.

Alright, so you have the number of houses you want to visit and the maximum range you are willing to go. Now it is time to build the canvas map. When building the map you want to optimize your path of travel, so that you are spending less time traveling and you are safer from traffic. Design your walking path to stay on the same side of the street as much as possible. For example you would want to go from 123 Apple St. as the first house then 125 Apple St. as the second house. You want to finish one side of the street and then make your way back on the other side of the street. 

Here is an example of how to create a better canvas map. Let’s say we are trying to reach the following people.

Sally lives at 122 Apple St.

Jim lives at 123 Apple St.

Hannah lives at 124 Apple St.

Paul lives at 125 Apple St.

Using our best practices from above we would organize these people like this.

Sally at 122 Apple St.

Hannah at 124 Apple St.

Paul at 125 Apple St.

Jim at 123 Apple St.

This path allows us to start where Sally lives, we walk on the same side of the street, cross over one time, and then end almost in the exact same spot as we started. This is an optimal canvas map for this example. In the real world you will need to travel much further, have many more crossovers, and you may not end anywhere near where you started. Keep this in mind while creating your canvas maps.

Now that you have everything you need for an optimized canvas map, let’s now put that into list form. Make sure that you have your fillable sections for your note taking. This can include a variety of things like whether or not they were home, have they moved away or passed away, what kind of policies do they support, what are their most pressing issues, a general note section, and whatever else you think will be useful.

Lastly, make sure that you always upload your notes, so that they are available to you and everyone else on your team for the next time you talk to them. This not only allows you to update and design your new canvas maps around these people, but it also shows that you actually cared for and listened to a member of your community. Just that little thought and effort may be enough for you to get their vote and win the election.