Printed Walk Lists: Paper Packets Built by Vottiv

The paper walkbook is a thing of the past. Campaigns have been printing, stapling, and re-typing door lists for decades, and for most of that time there was no other option. There is now, and Vottiv is doing everything we can to push the industry past the clipboard. Before you print anything, give the app five minutes.

Most campaigns reach for paper because they assume their volunteers cannot handle an app. The Vottiv canvasser app is built for exactly those volunteers, and setting it up takes less time than the walk to the first door.

Your volunteers can learn this in five minutes

There is nothing to download and no app store account to remember. A volunteer scans a QR code or taps the link you send, which opens vottiv.app in the browser already on their phone. The phone then offers to add it to the home screen, and after that it opens with one tap alongside their other apps.

Signing in asks for a first name, last name, email, and phone number. Those are the same four fields the paper QR code asks for at the end of a walk, so any volunteer who can finish a printed route can already sign in to the app. They type the 6-digit canvass code you hand out at the launch, pick the route closest to them, and start walking.

The map teaches the rest. Purple dots are the doors left to knock, a blue line shows the walking path, and each dot changes color as the volunteer marks the door. A short tutorial runs the first time someone opens a route. There is nothing to read beforehand and nothing to configure.

It works without signal, too. The app keeps recording in a dead zone and syncs everything once the phone finds a bar, so a rural route is not a reason to print.

Why the app beats paper

Every knock reaches you the moment it happens. You can watch the walk from your dashboard, see which routes are moving and which have stalled, and call the volunteer who needs help while they are still out there. When the night ends the results are already in the system. Nobody types up a stack of sheets, and nothing is lost to rain, bad handwriting, or a clipboard left in someone's back seat.

The data is what makes the next step possible. Every door marked in the app becomes something you can act on: text the undecided voters, call the strong supporters about a yard sign, mail the not-homes a postcard, or drop the whole group into a digital ad audience. A paper result can do none of that, because it never becomes data.

Give it a shot at your next launch

Test it on one route. Pick a volunteer at your next canvass launch, hand them the link instead of a clipboard, and watch their doors change color on your dashboard while they walk. You will know inside a single route whether your team needs paper at all. If it does not click, print the packet and you have lost nothing but five minutes.

Try it with the volunteer you would least expect to manage it. That is the honest test, and it is usually the one that ends the argument.

Setting up a team for the first time? The Vottiv Canvasser App setup guide in this section covers the home screen install, permissions, and canvass codes.

When you still need paper

Some volunteers will not carry a phone, and some campaigns want printed lists in the car as a backup. Vottiv builds those handouts for you, straight from the routes you already generated. No CSV export, no spreadsheet, no third-party AI tool.

Where to find it

Open your voter group, then open the canvass. Scroll to the Routes table and press Print.

Choose your routes

Each route becomes its own handout. Search by route name or by the canvasser assigned to it, tick the routes you want, and the footer counts your selection in routes and households before you build anything. The search matches the routes table, so a search that finds a route there finds it here.

Selecting more than 25 routes makes a large packet and generation runs for several minutes. Close the window and come back later; the build keeps going without you.

What you get

• Campaign packet (all routes). One PDF. An index sheet for HQ lists every route with the page it starts on, and the route handouts follow in name order.
• Individual route PDFs (zip). One file per route, named after the route. Use this when you want to email a single walk to a single volunteer.

Print the campaign packet double-sided, split the stack at each teal cover, staple, and hand a packet to each volunteer. The pages are padded so that a cover never prints on the back of the previous route.

What is on a walk list

A teal cover, a map of the route, then the doors. Addresses run in walking order: odd numbers up one side of the street to the far end, then even numbers back down the other side, so your volunteer finishes across the street from where they started. Streets are alphabetical. A multi-unit building gets one row per unit, with that unit's voters stacked together.

Every page repeats the route name, the page number within that route, the QR code, and the confidentiality notice. Each door has a Result box to mark by hand.

Doors your team already knocked still print. They show up shaded and struck through with their existing result, so a volunteer knows to walk past them and you keep the context on a second pass.

There is no Notes column, because nothing written on paper comes back into Vottiv.

The QR code is the only path back into Vottiv

When a walk is finished, the volunteer scans the QR code on any page of their handout. They enter a first name, last name, email, and phone number, which signs them up as a real Vottiv user. Vottiv then marks every remaining door on that walk list as canvassed and credits the work to them.

Doors already marked in the app do not change. Handwritten results do not transfer: the scan records that the walk happened, not what each voter said at the door. If you want per-voter answers, IDs, or survey responses, the app is the only way to capture them.

Worth noticing what that scan proves. A volunteer who can scan the QR at the end of a paper walk had a working phone in their pocket the whole time, and signing in to the app asks nothing more of them.

The scan page shows the route name and a household count. It never shows voter names or addresses, since a printed sheet is easy to lose.

What it costs

Printed walk lists cost $250 once for the canvass. After that you can reprint as often as you like, for any routes in that canvass, at no extra charge. Canvassing in the app is free of that charge, on every canvass.

If your organization holds the Voter Contact Package, printing is included and you pay nothing. Buy the package after paying the $250 and printing is free from that point forward; contact support about the canvass you already paid for, since we do not refund the charge automatically.

Rebuilding routes voids your printed packets

Every printed QR code points at one specific route. Rebuild your routes and those routes stop existing, so the codes stop working and a volunteer who scans one gets a notice instead of a form.

Vottiv blocks a route rebuild while printed packets are live. To rebuild, open the print window, press Void printed walk lists, confirm, and then rebuild. Paper already out in the field goes dead the moment you void, so gather it in first. Routes in the app carry no such restriction.

Downloads last 120 days

Your packets stay downloadable for 120 days after you build them. After that the files are cleared and you generate a fresh set.

Packets you already built are yours to keep. If a monthly Voter Contact Package lapses, you can still download every packet you have; only building new ones costs money again.