Sending your List to a Canvasser on MiniVAN

In order to use MiniVAN to canvass, you need to send a list to your volunteers so that they can load it onto MiniVAN on their phone or tablet.

If you are organising multiple sessions of canvassing, or sessions with a large group of volunteers then you should learn about organising it by dividing your list into what we call Turfs and running it from the My Turfs page. There is also a tool called Distributed Canvassing that allows you to avoid having to cut turfs. However, for the time being we'll keep it simple and show you the most direct ways of getting your list on to MiniVAN.

Please note that MiniVAN is designed to hold lists for canvassing sessions of a few hours. If you choose to download a large list (for example a whole ward) and your device does not have enough internal memory to cope with it then the app may crash. To avoid this, just download the data that you really need.

Hot Tip! If you want to canvass all voters in a whole polling district based on your delivery walks you can avoid Create a List entirely. Instead, go to Walk Manager, click on your chosen polling district and click on the blue Print All Walks link at the bottom of the screen and then follow the steps below from part 2c.

There are generally two ways to load a list into MiniVAN:

1. Send it to a specific MiniVAN user

OR

2. Generate a list number which the MiniVAN user types into their device

Sending a list directly to a MiniVAN user:

1A. Create a list on the My Voters tab

Load the list you would like to use by Creating a New list or loading a list you recently created from a folder. For canvassing we recommend using the Doorstep Canvass target pool which uses your past canvass data, marked register and postal voter lists as well as demographic modelling to send you to the households that are most likely to vote and be open to our message

1B. On the My List page, click the MiniVAN icon

1C. Send your list to a canvasser

Type the surname of the canvasser into the box and wait for the options to appear. If the canvasser you are expecting is not there, it is because they have not logged on to MiniVAN before, or are not a user in your local party organisation
Give your list a name
Choose the appropriate MiniVAN Campaign for your activity (this determines the questions they can ask and the data they can see)
Click Send Now to send the list to the canvasser

Generating a List Number:

2A. Create a list on the My Voters tab

For information on how to create a list, go back to the creating lists section of this guide

2B. On the My List page, click the print icon

You'll need to print a PDF to get a list number, even if you are not actually going to print the PDF onto paper

2C. Select the appropriate print options for your canvass

a. Report Format : This will determine how your canvass card is set up. Some report formats are linked to specific scripts, so if you pick one of the national options then it will probably fill out most of the rest of the screen for you
b. Script : This will determine which script is associated with your canvass and therefore what data the canvasser can record
c. Contacted How : For MiniVAN you should choose Doorstep
d. Title : This will be the name of your list, so you can change it to something other than default if you like, to make it clearer what area it covers
e. MiniVAN Campaign: Select the MiniVAN Campaign you want associated with this canvass (which determines the questions available in MiniVAN)

f. Untick the Print People Box: Towards the bottom of the page you can choose not to print the details of the voters - this is ideal for use with MiniVAN as you get a paper map that you can hand to your volunteers to help them, but you don't get pages and pages of personal data. If printing from Walk Manager you also get a check sheet of each walk, with corresponding list number and a box to make a note of who is canvassing it

For more information on how to set your criteria for a printed list, take a look at our guide on Printing a Canvass List later in this section.

2D. Generating the PDF

After clicking Next you will be directed to the My PDF page that will acknowledge your print request
If you click on the My PDF Files link, this will direct you to your PDF file. You can then find the List Number at the bottom of the PDF. This is what you will use to access the list in MiniVAN
Alternatively you can access My PDF Files by going to the main menu and clicking on My PDF Files on the upper left hand side of the Connect home screen

Once in the PDF Print Jobs view, you can then Download File by clicking on the corresponding link. This will prompt you to download the file onto your computer which can then be printed

Hot Tip! Did you you know that you can see all the PDFs created by other users in your local party by selecting their name from the drop down box on the My PDFs page? This means that you don't need to email canvass cards around. Other users can simply log in, select the name of the person who created them and download it themselves!