Comparing Reach to other canvassing apps

Reach as a canvassing app

Reach is built to enable a whole new mode of canvassing and data collection and it is not designed to be a direct replacement or alternative to the turf-based door knocking/walk list tools you may be familiar with.

Campaigns love Reach because it opens the door to more flexible canvassing work where walk lists and turfs are too limiting (everything from street corner tabling to farmers markets to canvassing your Uber driver who you get into a conversation with). Learn more about where to use Reach here.

Many campaigns use Reach alongside traditional door-knocking apps because it excels in catching voters who would otherwise fall through the cracks during door-knocking shifts. If you’ve ever volunteered to knock doors, you know how common it is to knock a door and say, “Hi, is Sasha there?” and the person who answers the door says, “My name is Jessica. I don’t know who Sasha is.” At that point, instead of walking away and saying “Thanks anyway”, a canvasser with Reach can just switch from their walk-list app (like MiniVAN or Polis or Ecanvasser or PDI) over to Reach, search for Jessica, and ID her!

Reach as a Relational Tool

Beyond the core canvassing features that are a foundational part of Reach, the tool also offers a fantastic relational organizing feature set. Relational Organizing is the most organic way to connect people to your campaign. Instead of blindly texting thousands of mystery voters, volunteers can easily canvass their existing networks all within the app!

Reach allows volunteers to quickly import their contacts and accurately match them to your voter file. No need to draw a hard line between people your volunteers have known for a long time and people they’re just met in the context of the campaign. Instead, we go back to the basics of what relational organizing is all about and integrate relational organizing seamlessly with field work. For a deep-dive on how Reach handles relational organizing, check out this post.

Feature-by-feature comparison

What if I really want to knock doors using only Reach?

We do work with some campaigns who don’t have access to a traditional targeted walk-list tool and therefore use Reach that way. by just searching a given address that they’re standing in front of (or a whole street they’re standing on) and knocking every door with a registered voter behind it and recording the results. If you do want to use Reach to knock doors like this, make sure you use our Custom Survey Questions features to give your canvassers the tools they need and make search results and history screens as useful as possible. Some ideas of how this could work:

1. Encourage users to search for a single address or a whole street name. Then, on the Search Results screen, you can tap “Filters & Prefs” in the top right corner to sort the result by Address, resulting in basically a walk-list of every door on the street.
2. Create a “Canvass Results” single choice question with answers like “Not Home”, “Hostile”, “Other Language”, etc.
3. Use Tags to indicate which voters are in your universe. You can do this by ensuring you include an “in my universe” column in the data you send us when setting up your campaign. Then, we can load that data along with your initial voter file and can use that column to create a Tag for “In Universe”, so when you’re looking at a voter’s profile screen, you’ll see that Tag at the top of the screen. Additionally, when a User is viewing their own Network or History tabs, they can display Tags in those screens to easily see which of their contacts are in your universe.

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