How to: Track your Canvass Results

(5 min read)

Canvass Results returns information about the number of voter contacts, NOT the number of voters. You can find these reports in the Report Manager.

Canvass Results also appear on an individual voter record under the Contact History page section. 

How it works

Canvass Results, Create a List, and Counts and Crosstabs give different results because they are intended to count different things.

Counts associated with Canvass Results can be much larger than the numbers from Create a List because one or more canvassers may have contacted the same person multiple times. Each canvass attempt on the same voter will appear in your counts within the date range you specify. A canvass attempt is unique with respect to Voter/Canvasser/Day. So, if the same canvasser contacted the same voter again on the same day, it will only be recorded as one attempt. However, if the same canvasser contacted the same voter again on a different day, a second attempt will be recorded.

Counts associated with Counts and Crosstabs have all suppressions removed automatically. This is not necessarily true in Create a List, where for example, voters marked Deceased are suppressed because you do not want to add them to your voter contact lists. If suppressions are removed from searches then your numbers should match what you see in Counts and Crosstabs.

Viewing the Canvassing Summary

You can view a summary of how many voters were contacted on the Canvassing Summary page. 

This page will show a summary of the Walk Results specified by your Scripts. You can enable additional Walk or Call Results to be tallied by adding them to the Canvass Results Preferences page (see below). You can narrow the results displayed by the following criteria:
 

The Geo View menu allows you to group the canvass results you are viewing into larger units. You can break down your results by various geographical areas, as well as by Team, which is a collection of Users, most likely working together in a particular area.
 

After specifying the parameters of your summary page, click Export to Excel to export a text file that contains the same data currently displayed on the screen. 

Survey Question Summary

You can also view a detailed breakdown of the responses to a particular Survey Question on the Survey Question Summary page. 

This page works exactly like the Canvassing Summary Page described above, except that instead of viewing canvass results, you can select one Survey Question at a time, and view detailed information about the responses to it that your canvassers received.  Also, this Summary counts only the most Recent Response so these numbers will be lower than what you will see on the Canvassing Summary page.

Canvass Results Preferences 

Canvass Results Preferences let you define which results will be displayed on the summary page. You can specify the default filter settings to narrow down your canvass, as well as the default Geo View. You can also select the Survey Questions and canvass responses that will appear as columns when displaying Canvass Results.

Viewing Canvass Trends

The Canvass Results by Hour of the Day, Canvass Results by Day of the Week, and Canvass Results by Day and Hour pages allow you to identify large-scale trends within your canvassing data. On each page, you can narrow your canvass results by the parameters described above. Results are then automatically grouped by time and day of the week collected.

FAQ

Why do I get different numbers when I look at the same data on Create a New List, Canvass Results, and Counts and Crosstabs?

• Create a New List returns exclusively counts of people, regardless of how many times they've been canvassed or asked particular questions. So if a voter is asked three times whether they support a candidate and they say they love her three times, a search for that candidate's supporters will return that voter just once.
• Counts and Crosstabs, like Create a New List, returns counts of people but will differ from it for a couple reasons. First, because Counts and Crosstabs are used for analytic purposes, we include various suppressed inpiduals in the totals. Second, some people don't have relevant data, even for seemingly universal categories like sex or age. So if you use Counts and Crosstabs to get a breakdown of all ages, the total number will differ from all voters since there are always some voters for whom a date of birth is simply missing.

So how is a canvassing result generated?

• If a voter responds in any way to a Survey Question as part of a Script, a Contact History entry (Canvassing Result) is generated.  If you apply an Activist Code via phone banking, a canvassing result will also appear on the record.

Which canvass result codes cause phone numbers and addresses to be marked 'bad' or otherwise affect a person's record?

• Deceased - predictably will mark the person as deceased
• Moved - marks the current primary/voting address as bad
• Wrong Number/Not at This Number - marks the current preferred number as bad
• Disconnected - marks the current preferred number as bad
• Do Not Call - sets the No Call suppression flag on the record
• Do Not Walk - sets the No Walk suppression flag on the record

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