Creating your Own Canvas Maps

Creating your own canvas maps is a very daunting task. Between figuring out which houses to go to, what’s the best route to take, how many houses you should visit in a day, how far you can travel, and a whole multitude of other factors, it makes creating a canvas map extremely time consuming and difficult. Have no fear, with a little guidance and support you’ll be able to easily create your own map in 10 steps. If you are unsure on what a canvas map is, please look at What is a Canvas Map? to give you a good understanding of what they are.

Step 1: Find your target audience

You will first need to figure out who you want to target while canvassing. Without using APS Sciences software, this step will take you the most amount of time and is extremely difficult to get. You have 2 options, the first would be to spend a lot of time figuring out the best people to canvas, thus saving you a lot of time while canvassing, or you will have to go to all houses and spend even more time out in the field. Time is one most important thing to save during a campaign. Now to find your target audience you will need to create a list of criterias to lower the total amount of houses down. This can include things like, who is guaranteed to vote for you but needs a reminder to get to the polls, a swing voter, or maybe you want to target specific groups of people like electricians, or women over the age of 50, etc. These are your own criteria based around your strategy to win your election.

Step 2: Set your maximum criterias

Once you have the people you want to canvas towards, you then need to place marks on a map to indicate the chosen houses. From here, you will need to set your maximum criterias. This includes things like how many houses can one person visit a day, what’s the maximum distance they can travel, how long they should be out canvassing, what kind of transportation they are using, and whatever other criteria you want to set.

Step 3: Start plotting on your map

Grab yourself a ruler and pencil and start drawing circles on your map that takes into account all of your criteria. Try to make sure that your circles don’t overlap because you do not want to visit a house more than once in the same day. You may need to make some circles larger or smaller to fit every house in. Make sure that you don’t exceed your maximum criterias.

Step 4: Find your outliers and add them to the closest circle 

If you find houses that do not fit within any circle, you will need to add them to the closest circle or you can remove them from your targeted audience. While every house is important to reach out to, if it will take too long to get to or is too difficult to get to, then it is okay to remove a few houses from your lists. These are potential voters so don’t get rid of too many outliers.

Step 5: Plan your route

Now that you have all the houses assigned to a circle, you now have to go into each circle and plan your route. Remember to check out Best Practices for Canvas Maps when planning your route. Try and plan a singular route where you stay on the same side of the street with minimal road crossovers. Depending on how you are traveling to each house, you may want to create a route that gets you back to your starting point to minimize wasted walking time after you are done canvassing. Rinse and repeat until you have a route planned for all your circles.

Step 6: Use your route to generate a fillable form

You should have your houses that you plan to travel in order already. Now take that list and generate a form that can be filled out by you and/or your volunteers in that order. This is so that you can have a form that will allow you to easily take notes while canvassing, and it will be an easy guide on which house to go to next.

Step 7: Go out and canvas

This is where you can go out in the field and canvas from house to house. While canvassing, make sure you take good notes.

Step 8: Upload your notes

Now that you are back, take your notes and upload them into a database that you can easily access. This should include things like whether or not they were home, what kind of issues they are concerned about, are they planning on supporting you with their vote or financially, do you need to follow up later with them, and whatever else you might track.

Step 9: Update your map with houses that couldn’t be reached or follow up houses

Now plot all the houses that couldn’t be reached while canvassing or anyone else that you want to follow up with.

Step 10: Repeat steps 3 through 9

Repeat steps 3 through 9 until you have reached all the houses and have no more follow ups you want to reach.

Now you have successfully created and updated your very own canvas maps. While campaigning, it is important to understand that canvas maps are an ever evolving procedure. You should always have canvas maps available to you, and if you ever run out of houses, you can always repeat some houses or target different groups that might be more difficult to campaign towards. This whole process is extremely time consuming and difficult, but check out Advantages of Using Our Canvas Maps on why APS Sciences should do all the heavy lifting for you and your team.