The phone

The Field OP app is what a volunteer carries to the door. It holds one mission at a time, works without a signal, and sends what you recorded as soon as it can reach the campaign. This page is for the person knocking, and for the organizer who has to explain it to them.

Getting the app

The app runs on Android. It is not in the Google Play store yet, so your campaign gives you the app and tells you how to install it. An iPhone version is built from the same app but has not been given out yet; until it is, an iPhone uses the app in Safari, at the address your campaign gives you.

Signing in

The app asks for your campaign's sign-in name — a short code your campaign gives you, on a poster or in the message that invited you — and then your e-mail address. It never guesses which campaign you belong to.

Invited by e-mail? The invitation's link is your invitation — it works once, for the address it was sent to, and stops working when the invitation expires. Copy the whole link from the message and paste it into the sign-in name box: the app keeps the invitation, shows only the campaign's name, and says "Your invitation is ready on this phone". You can also open the link in the phone's browser and sign in there first; after that the app needs only your sign-in. Then one of:

A one-time link. Give your e-mail address and the app sends a link that works once. Open it and you come straight back to the app.
Your e-mail and password, if you have set one. At least twelve characters. New here? Choose your password e-mails you a link to choose your first one; your invitation made your account, so there is no "create an account".
Continue with Google or Continue with Microsoft, on builds where your campaign has them switched on. Microsoft does not vouch for your address, so for an account your invitation made use the link or a password instead.

Choosing a password, verifying your address and resetting a password all finish in the app. The message the campaign sends has a link; open it on this phone and it brings you back into the app to finish — the address verified, or a new password chosen here. If the link opens somewhere else (a laptop, a different browser), copy it and use Paste the link from the message on the sign-in screen.

No account yet? If you scanned a poster or were given a code at a table, I have a code from a poster on the sign-in screen lets you leave your name and one way to reach you. A person at the campaign decides what happens next; nothing else is recorded about you. Scan the poster’s square reads the code for you — with the camera on an iPhone, and in a browser that can read codes — with no picture kept; on Android, and in a browser that cannot, you type the code printed beside the square. Whoever is signed in on the phone, their sign-in is never sent with somebody else’s name.

The first time you sign in, the app shows you what Field OP holds about you. It is worth the minute: it says what is kept, what the app does and does not do with your location, and how long the people data on your phone lasts. You can read it again any time from the app.

What you see

My missions lists the walks you have been given, newest first, each with its turf, its window, how many stops it has, and how far you have got. Nothing in the app compares you with another volunteer, in any release. A manager has no missions and sees an empty list; that is correct, not a fault.

Below the list: how many shifts are waiting on an answer from you, your follow-ups, what this phone is holding, a way to sign somebody up with a poster code, what Field OP holds about you, Settings, privacy and help, and Sign out. Under Settings, The languages you canvass in is where you tick the languages you can hold a conversation in, for each campaign you are in; the people who assign missions see them beside your name.

If the campaign's account has lapsed, been suspended or is closing, a notice at the foot of every screen says so as soon as you open the app — before you walk to a door. It is the campaign's account, not your sign-in, and nothing you do on the phone changes it; tell your organizer.

My follow-ups lists the follow-ups you have been given — a lawn sign to drop off, somebody to ring back — late ones first. Open one to mark it started or done, or to write down what happened; that is yours to do whatever your role, a volunteer's included. Handing it to somebody else, moving its date or its priority, and calling it off are for the people who run the campaign, who have them on the same screen (Shifts and follow-ups).

Shifts you were asked to shows each invitation with the canvass, the window and the organizer's note, and two buttons — Yes, I can and No, I cannot. Your answer goes straight to the campaign rather than into the offline queue, because an organizer is counting on it. You see nobody else's answer and no count of anybody but yourself.

If a campaign asked you to a shift before you ever used Field OP, you sign in through an invitation of your own: ask your organizer to have you invited by e-mail, and use the link in that message (above). Being asked to a shift does not make an account for you on its own. You have no walk until an organizer gives you one. If an organizer has since taken you off a campaign, signing in again does not put you back: the screen says you have no active place, and an organizer can add you again.

Settings, privacy and help is where you choose how the app looks — follow the phone, light, dark, or Bright sunlight, black on white for reading outdoors — and how much fits on a screen (Compact, Comfortable or Spacious; buttons stay full size whichever you choose), turn on two-step verification (the app hands the key straight to an authenticator app on the same phone; in a browser it changes only the account this page is signed in as, and if somebody else has signed in to the browser since, it says so and changes nothing), and read the legal set: the full Privacy Notice, the terms, the acceptable-use rules, the data processing terms, the labelling terms, the trait schedule and who else handles the data. Those are drawn in the app itself, so they read with no signal and without signing in, and each names its version and the fingerprint of its exact wording. This help opens in a browser sheet over the app. If your role reaches past a mission, it also opens the console at your campaign's sign-in page, for the back-office work that is not in the app's More yet; it is the same account. Start a new organization opens the sign-up page in your phone's own browser, outside the app, because signing up ends with a payment and the app takes no payment of any kind.

Signing out after two idle hours. If your role reaches past a mission — people's records, the campaign's field work or its administration; an observer and a candidate included — the app signs you out after 120 minutes nobody has used it — a tap, a key, a scroll, typing or a screen reader's press all count — with a warning and Stay signed in two minutes before, and it lands on the sign-in screen with nothing behind it to go back to. In a browser, working in a console tab counts too. The console itself keeps its own thirty minutes, and in one browser the app and the console are one sign-in: using either counts for both, but with a console tab open, thirty minutes of using neither can sign you out of both — close the console tab if you mean to step away for longer. It never signs out while an answer is still on the phone — unsent, refused or set aside — because signing out would delete it, and it waits while you are on a mission's screens or walking a mission you have set off on, for up to three hours nobody touches the phone. While it waits it says why at the foot of the screen. A volunteer or a captain is never signed out this way, whatever grant they hold.

Two-step verification, when your organization requires it. If an administrator turns it on for your role while you are signed in, the app says so at the top of every screen and offers to turn it on; it opens the screen that explains it once, and never while you are on a door, walking a mission or holding an unsent answer.

For captains and field managers

Your team appears for captains and managers. It shows the calls for help from people out walking — refreshed every fifteen seconds while the screen is open — with I have seen it, which records that a person saw the call (it closes nothing). Below it are the canvasses under way or next; open one to see how it is going: each walk's state, when it started and finished, the households left on its turf, whether it has gone quiet for an hour (a guess about a walk, never a fact about a person), how many people are on it, each shift against what is needed, the follow-ups raised and the campaign's own numbers. It never shows one volunteer against another.

A field manager can also assign a mission from there: choose the ground, the window (the canvass's own, from now until it ends, or any window inside it), the shift it is for, and the people, searching the campaign's roster — those who said yes to a shift first, by name, where an administrator has turned that on.

Under Your team, and in More under Field, are Canvasses and Campaigns: the rest of the console's Field area. A field manager plans a canvass, edits its plan and sets its lead, moves it along, chooses its wording, adds or withdraws somebody on a mission or takes a mission back, closes the canvass, keeps the roster, and opens a walk sheet that came back on paper — by scanning its square or typing its code — to type it in one door at a time. A captain sees the canvasses they lead there, with the plan read-only, and adds or withdraws volunteers on their missions. The Field page says what each of these does.

Calls for help reach the phone only while Your team is open; nothing is pushed to a phone in a pocket yet.

For everybody who runs the campaign: More

If your role reaches past a mission, More appears at the top right of My missions. It lists every screen your role reaches in the app, grouped the way the console groups them — People, Organize, Field, Work, Insights and Admin — and only those: what appears is what the campaign says your role may do, never a list of buttons that would be refused. A screen you may read and not change says Read only, at the door and again at the top of the screen. A volunteer has no More, because a volunteer's work is the mission.

Today More holds Your team, Canvasses and Campaigns, and from Your team The campaign map: every turf by status, cutting new turf by drawing it with a finger, and one turf's walk, map pack and walk sheet (Drawing turf). Under People it holds People, Duplicate review and Data quality: finding somebody, their record, their household, deciding possible duplicates, and the counts about the records themselves (People and imports, under People on the phone). Under Field it holds Shifts and sign-ups — planning and changing shifts, asking people, recording answers, the poster's code and the stall's sign-up sheet — and under Work Follow-ups, the whole queue (Shifts and follow-ups). Under Organize it holds Universes and Scripts and surveys, under Insights Home numbers and Every measure (below), and under Admin it holds Import, Export and Custody (Imports, custody and exports on a phone), Name labelling (below), and for a tenant administrator also Who can sign in (invitations and whether each message went, members' names, password resets, signing somebody out everywhere, and the two-step rule — making it optional again asks you to confirm it is you, as in the console), Access (grants — approving one as the second administrator is the first thing on the screen, and issuing, declining and revoking ask you to confirm it is you, exactly as in the console), Billing, The agreement, the Audit log, which shows each change as identifiers and its shape, never a record's content (Billing and plans), and Tags — the organization's own words for people, how many carry each, and making a new one. The rest of the console arrives in More area by area, in every build of the app at once — Android, the browser, and the iPhone once its build is out. Until a screen is there, it is in the console, with the same sign-in — Settings, privacy and help opens it.

Some things are never on a phone, whoever you are: a full date of birth, sex or gender, restricted notes, and the restricted columns of an imported list. They stay in the console.

Organize, Insights and name labelling are in More as well. Under Organize, Universes lists a campaign's universes and builds one a group at a time — the path to the group you are in is named above it — then counts it, shows its numbers and who no turf reaches, and keeps its goals and snapshots; Scripts and surveys shows every version of the campaign's wording and its variants, and writes the next version for somebody who may. Under Insights, Home numbers and Every measure show each number with the version of its definition and open the records behind it; they ask again every fifteen seconds while they are on screen, and stop while another screen is in front of them or the app is in the background. Under Admin, Name labelling has its switch, its terms, running it and how often it is wrong — totals and communities only, never a person (Labels).

Files. A file you download — an export, the rows an import did not process, or a turf's walk sheet — opens the phone's own share sheet or print dialog, so you choose where it goes, and the app keeps its own copy only as long as the phone needs it to finish handing the file over. In a phone's browser, a PDF to print opens in the browser's own viewer instead, and Print is in its share sheet or menu.

Codes. A screen that asks for a code — today a returned walk sheet's, under Campaigns — lets an iPhone read it with the camera, on the phone, with no picture kept; on Android, and in a browser that cannot read codes, you type the code printed beside the square.

Walking a turf

When your organizer has written instructions for the canvass or named a meeting point, the mission screen shows them under From your organizer.

Open a mission and you get the walk: the stops in the order they are meant to be walked, with the address and who is expected at each. Press Start the walk to tell the campaign you have set off. You can record a door without pressing it; it is only how the campaign knows the walk is under way.

Open the map draws the same walk: the turf's outline, the stops numbered, the doors already answered shown as answered, and — only if you agree to it — a dot for where you are standing. The map works with no signal, but it has to be downloaded first; the button names the size before you press it, so you can decide on your own data. Three things can be missing and none of them stops the walk: nobody may have cut a map pack for this turf yet, you may have declined the location permission, or the street labels may not have loaded. The list of stops is always there.

In the browser app (Field OP at /m/ in Safari or Chrome) the map is the same turf, stops and answered doors, read from the campaign while the page is open — nothing is downloaded and nothing is kept in the browser, so it needs a signal. It never shows where you are standing; the installed app can.

Your position never leaves your screen. It is drawn from your phone's own sensor, it is never sent to the campaign, it is never stored, and there is no part of Field OP that would accept it. If you decline the location permission everything else works exactly the same.

Recording a door

Tap a stop and answer what happened. The outcomes you are offered are your campaign's own — the list it decided on, never a default set — and so is the support scale, if it uses one. The first question decides the rest: an outcome that means somebody answered asks who, and then offers the language and support questions; an outcome that means nobody did asks neither.

What to say sits at the top of the door, when the campaign has written a script. Some campaigns write more than one wording — a shorter one, another language — with a rule for who hears which. Once you say who came to the door, the screen shows the wording the campaign chose for that person, names it, and says why ("because of their language"). Read the usual wording instead is always there, and using it is always allowed. The app records which wording you read, so the campaign can tell which one works.

When you spoke with somebody the list names, the screen also offers the campaign's survey — ask only what they are happy to answer; nothing in it stops you saving. Where the campaign's build asks it, the screen also offers did they agree to be contacted?, one question per channel, to be read aloud as written. Tick only what they said yes to. What you tick goes to the campaign with the words you read, and the campaign confirms it before anybody is contacted. Most builds do not ask it yet.

When somebody else answered and they live there, tick Add them as a resident and write the name they gave. That does not put them on the list by itself: it goes to the campaign's data team, who check whether they are already on file and add them if not.

Then Did they ask for anything? — six toggles: a lawn sign, wants to volunteer, asked for information, wants to hear from the candidate, come back another time, and asked not to be visited again. The first five each raise a follow-up that somebody at the campaign picks up. The last one takes the door off every walk list, and it cannot be undone from the app — the screen warns you before you save.

There is a box for anything worth remembering, and then Save this result. Saving twice, or a retry from the queue, cannot record the same door twice: the app mints one id for the answer and keeps it.

A household marked do not knock is still shown on the walk, and opening it tells you so in words with no form to fill in. That is deliberate — you need to know why you are walking past it.

Correcting a result. Open a door you have already recorded and the screen says what you recorded. Once the campaign has it, Correct that result lets you record the right answer with a few words on why. The campaign keeps both and counts the correction. A result is corrected once: if somebody else corrected it first — your partner on a pair's walk, or you on another phone — yours is refused, the app says so, and you can send it as refused so the campaign knows. Until the first answer has reached the campaign there is nothing there to correct yet, and the screen says so. If the first answer said how somebody feels about the campaign, the correction has to say how that same person feels again; the campaign refuses a correction that would leave the first answer standing on its own.

If the screen ever says This answer was not saved, it means exactly that: the phone could not write it down. Everything you entered is still on the screen — try saving again, and if it keeps happening, note the result on paper and tell your organizer.

When there is no signal

The app never says "offline", because it does not know whether it is — it only knows what it has sent and what it has not. At the bottom of the screen it tells you which:

"3 answers waiting to send" — they are saved on this phone and go on their own as soon as the campaign can be reached. Carry on knocking.
"3 answers sent" — everything you have recorded has reached the campaign.
"1 answer was refused" — the campaign would not accept it. The mission screen lists each refused answer with the reason — most often, the mission is no longer yours, or the campaign took that door off your walk (or moved the household) after your phone downloaded it; the app records answers only about the doors of your own walk — and three things you can do: Send as refused (the campaign keeps a record that you recorded it, when, and why it was refused — never what was said — and the answer leaves this phone once the campaign has that record), Keep on this phone (it stays here, and no longer stops you finishing the walk), or Try again. Nothing you recorded is ever removed without the campaign knowing it existed.

Do not sign out while a count is above zero. Signing out clears this phone, and anything that has not reached the campaign would go with it. The app warns you, says how many, and asks a second time before it does it — including on the screen you see when a mission's window has closed. Stay signed in until the count reaches zero.

Handing a phone to somebody else. If somebody signs in on a phone where you are still signed in, the app does not send your answers under their name. It stops and asks: keep you signed in so your answers can still go, or clear the phone — saying how many answers that would lose — and continue as them.

Finishing

When you are done, press Finish the walk. The app will not let you close a walk while this phone is holding anything unsent — it counts what is waiting, says so, and offers Send them now first. An answer the campaign refused holds the walk open too, until you try it again or set it aside. That rule lives on the phone because the queue is on the phone; the campaign cannot check it for you.

Safety

Every mission carries a safety panel: I need help, check in, check out, and an incident note with room to say what happened. It goes to the campaign's safety board, where a manager — or the captain leading your canvass, on their own phone under Your team — sees the kind, how long ago and what you said.

When you press I need help:

It is sent at once if there is a signal, and kept on the phone and sent the moment there is one if there is not. The screen says which.
The people running your canvass are e-mailed straight away: the captain leading it, and the campaign's managers, field leads and organizers. The e-mail says who you are, when you asked, and which canvass and turf; it does not carry what you wrote, and nothing anywhere says where you are.
The screen tells you who was told — for example, "an e-mail is on its way to 3 people running this canvass, and it is on the safety board". If nobody could be e-mailed, it says so.
Right under the button are two more: Call 911 — emergency, and Call the campaign, which rings the number your campaign gave for this. They use the phone's own dialler, and they work even when the message could not be sent. If your campaign has not given a number, the screen says so and 911 is there alone.

If the app says it needs updating, it stops recording doors — but it does not stop you asking for help. The update screen keeps I need help for the mission you have open, and both call buttons.

It carries no location, because the app sends none. And neither the board nor the e-mail is an alarm that rings on somebody's phone: they are read when somebody looks. If you are in danger, call 911. Agree before a canvass who is watching the board.

Under it, What happened to my calls asks the campaign what has reached it from you on this mission — not from your partner on a pair's walk — and for a call for help, whether a person has said they saw it. Your partner's calls, and anything anybody wrote in a note, are not sent to your phone at all; the people who answer a call read the note, and nobody else does. Ask again asks once more. It needs a signal: with none it says it could not ask, and what this phone is still holding is shown under What this phone is holding.

The data on your phone

While a mission is open you are carrying real people's names and addresses on your own phone. The mission screen says the three times plainly: how long the doors are usable, how long the phone keeps them, and how long the campaign will still accept what you recorded.

The doors are usable until the end of your canvass window or 24 hours from the download, whichever is sooner. Your phone deletes them 12 hours after that. The campaign goes on accepting what you recorded until 24 hours after the mission window ends — so a phone that could not get a signal all evening still has time.

Where the doors came from an electoral list, the mission is refused until you sign an undertaking for it. The app shows you the clauses, one list at a time, and you sign in your own name. There is no skip and no "remind me later", and nobody can sign it for you — not even your organizer. Keep to what you signed: Settings → Undertakings you have signed shows each one again — which list, when, and the words you agreed to.

What you record is written to an encrypted store on the phone before anything is sent, and signing out destroys that store and its key. That is why the sign-out warning matters.

What the campaign can and cannot show you

You see your assigned mission and nothing else. No scores, no inferred labels and no restricted notes reach a volunteer, a captain or a candidate by any path — not in the bundle, not in a search, not in an export. That is a rule of the platform, not a setting your campaign can change. (Staff who hold the Restricted Data grant see what the software guesses on a person's record in More, read live and never kept on the phone; restricted details stay off every phone, whoever holds it.)

If the app is too old to record a door safely, it says so at the start and asks you to update before you set off, rather than letting you knock all evening and fail at the end. Asking for help and the two call buttons still work on that screen.

Next: Field — the manager's side of the same walk · Labels and what they mean · Privacy, do-not-contact and rights requests · Getting help