Paper walk sheets invent synonyms. One volunteer writes “SS,” another writes “strong,” a third invents “1.” By week three your export is a mess and your manager cannot trust the chart. The fix is not more training alone — it is one shared list of door outcomes that matches how your team actually talks.
The mismatch usually is not laziness. It is that the default codes do not fit the work. A precinct captain doing party ID thinks in strong and weak party terms, not “strong support.” A sales rep thinks in “callback” and “DNQ,” not “visited.” When the button on the screen does not match the sentence in the rep’s head, they hesitate, guess, or write it in the notes field where no chart will ever find it.
In CanvassLite you can edit those outcomes yourself: rename buttons, change colors, reorder them, add new ones, and (for political campaigns) assign voter ID scores. Here is how.
Open your campaign dashboard → Settings → General → Visit Statuses.
From that card you can:
Refresh the dashboard once after a deploy if you do not see the section yet. Volunteers pick up the new labels the next time they open the field app.
Political projects start with a 1–5 support scale plus Not Home, Refused, and Moved/Deceased. That works for ID canvassing out of the box. Many precinct captains want language that matches party work instead of generic “Strong Support.”
Rename freely. Change “1-Strong Support” to your own party’s shorthand, your candidate’s name, or whatever your captains say out loud. Renaming updates labels everywhere — field buttons, filters, and the Voter ID Score Distribution chart — without breaking past visits. The internal key stays the same; only the display name changes.
A precinct captain running party ID typically ends up with something like this — substitute your own party and your opponent’s in the brackets:
| Default preset | Renamed for party ID | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1-Strong Support | Strong [Our Party] | 1 |
| 2-Lean Support | Weak [Our Party] | 2 |
| 3-Undecided | Persuadable / Undecided | 3 |
| 4-Lean Oppose | Weak [Other Party] | 4 |
| 5-Strong Oppose | Strong [Other Party] | 5 |
| Not Home | Not Home | — |
| Refused | Refused to engage | — |
| Moved/Deceased | Bad address | — |
Note that the scores never moved. Only the words changed. That is the whole point: your volunteers speak your language while the analytics stay comparable across the entire cycle.
One caution on the middle row: resist the temptation to label score 3 “Independent.” Party registration and support level are different things. Plenty of registered independents are firm supporters, and plenty of registered partisans are genuinely on the fence. If you code a whole registration category as undecided, your persuasion universe fills up with people who already decided.
Independent candidates, nonpartisan races such as school board or judicial seats, and ballot measure campaigns should skip party labels entirely and name the levels after the candidate or the question:
The scale underneath is identical — 1 through 5, most favorable to least. Only the vocabulary changes, so the Voter ID Score Distribution chart still reads the same way whether you are running a partisan primary or a school board race. For nonpartisan races specifically, see our school board campaign field guide.
Assign scores for Analytics. Political statuses can carry an optional score of 1 through 5. That score feeds the Voter ID Score Distribution bar chart. Rules that keep data honest:
If you need a brand-new scored outcome, add a status and give it a free score. Do not recycle an old button for a different meaning.
For when to use ID vs persuasion codes in the field, see persuasion vs ID canvassing.
Sales and KnockRoute-style projects start with outcomes like Interested, Not Interested, Callback, Closed/Sale, and Not Home. Rename them to your pipeline language — “Demo Booked,” “DNQ,” “Competitor,” whatever your CRM expects.
D2D campaigns do not use voter ID scores. Analytics shows a Lead Outcome Distribution bar chart from your disposition list instead (same Settings order and colors). The doughnut Visit Status chart still shows contact mix for the period.
Tip: keep Not Home (or No Answer) separate from Not Interested. If you lump them together, you cannot diagnose contact rate vs pitch problems. More on that in our guides on tracking door-to-door reps and field accountability.
Editing this one list changes more than the buttons on a phone. The same status drives:
This is why the color choice is not decorative. If Not Home is amber and Refused is gray, a manager scanning the map at 8pm can tell “come back” from “never come back” without opening a single record.
A custom list only helps if every volunteer uses it the same way. At the start of a shift, read the list out loud once and give one sentence of guidance per ambiguous code. The two that always need it:
Put the ambiguous pair in your shift brief rather than in a training document nobody opens.
Rule three is the one campaigns learn the hard way. Say you knocked 400 doors coding Strong Support as score 1, then decide mid-cycle that your scale was too generous and try to move it to score 2. Every one of those 400 doors silently shifts columns in the Voter ID chart, and your September report no longer matches your July report. Nothing in the visit records changed, but the story the data tells did. That is why the score locks the moment a status has doors behind it.
If your scale genuinely needs rework mid-cycle, the safe path is to add new statuses alongside the old ones and let the old codes age out. Your export keeps both, and you can reconcile deliberately instead of discovering the shift in a meeting.
Open your campaign dashboard and go to Settings, then General, then Visit Statuses. From that card you can rename labels, change colors, reorder buttons, add new outcomes, and remove statuses that have never been used on a door.
Yes. Renaming changes only the label volunteers see. Past doors keep the same internal status key, so your history stays intact and Analytics simply displays the new name.
Once a status has visits logged against it, changing its 1 to 5 score would reclassify every past door in the Voter ID Score Distribution chart. Add a new status with a free score instead of remapping an old one.
Your door codes should sound like your team — party ID language for campaigns, funnel language for sales — without inventing a new spreadsheet every week. Set them once in Settings, train volunteers on that list, and let the dashboard count what actually happened at the door.
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