Destroyers my phone battery if location settings is on but makes canvassing a hell of a lot more efficient and streamlined access to data for campaigns. Could make it less of a battery killer and improve mapping data since some homes are harder to find if they don’t fit the norm but there isn’t any better option. Canvassing is the top determiner of election results easily. Suggestion: allow user to store more than 1 list at a time so they can switch between them. Also make less clicking needed to answer for multiple household members by default especially when usually only one responds if at all.

Overall, we have found this app to be helpful and less bulky than carrying around paper lists. The biggest problem is that no matter what we do, we cannot get this app to sync with other users. After a couple hours of canvassing and refreshing the sink several times per hour, we still can’t tell where the other canvassers have been as shown in the instructional video. It did work one day out of about 200, so we know it is possible, but we have never been able to duplicate that before or since. We end up having to spend an extra 20 minutes going through our individual lists with one another and manually adding them to our own phones. Super inconvenient. The other problem with this app is that the map feature seems to be based on Apple Maps, which as everyone knows, is terrible. It rarely shows an accurate picture of where an address physically is. Google maps is much better in that regard.

I’ve been canvassing with miniVAN for a few months now, and the benefits far outweigh my complaints. Being able to see all the houses you’re going to along with your own location is so much easier than trying to follow a paper list of addresses (which I’d end up finding on my phone’s map anyway!) My only complaints are that results imputed from paper packets don’t appear on the app, and that sometimes the gps will show the icon for the address at a completely different location from where it actually is (I was walking “park ave.” and it showed some of the houses as being across the city on “park st.” and I didn’t realize the mistake until I had already driven across the city to get the rogue houses -_-). Still, better than paper!

I’m a field director in NC, and I manage large groups of people for boots on the ground campaigns across the state. The platform is well designed, but often poorly executed. For example, when sending turf maps there is an option to send to multiple canvassers. We have two parallel campaigns, and they function very differently. The problem is, even when selecting our second campaign, it only ever sends the first one. This means instead of sending turf to 90+ people in groups of ten or more, we are sending it s l o w l y, one at a time. This turns a one person, few minutes task into a multiple person, half hour task, especially with how unresponsive the site can be. This is not the only broken/buggy feature on the platform, but it is one of the most egregious tine wasters: especially if someone isn’t aware it doesn’t work, and mistakenly sends turf this way, unintentionally sabotaging a day of work for the entire office.