Planning territories
A door-knocking Saturday runs on three answers: which streets are worth working, who is covering what, and how far along everyone is. The planner holds all three in one place, so they stop living in a spreadsheet and a stack of photocopied maps.
Planning lives on the same map your team captures visits on. Open GoReach → Map and switch the toggle in the top-left from Capture to Plan. The pins fade out, the areas you have drawn come forward, and the panel on the left becomes your list of areas. Switch back to Capture and it is the field map again — with your areas still faintly outlined, so a captured visit visibly lands inside its block. If you have not used GoReach before, start with Reach Your Community for what the tool is for.
On a phone the list is a sheet at the bottom of the map instead of a panel: pull it up for the full list, and when an area is selected its door counter sits in the sheet's top edge where your thumb is.
Start a campaign
A campaign is one push into the community — Easter invites, a back-to-school door hang, a neighbourhood survey. Everything else hangs off it, and finishing one keeps its numbers forever.
In Plan mode the current campaign is the chip at the top of the map. Tap it to switch campaigns, start a new one, or finish the current one.
Find the neighbourhoods that need you
Tick Priority overlay and the map shades every census tract from light to dark. Darker means more homes packed closer together and lower median household income — the areas where a knock on the door reaches the most people who are least likely to already have a church.
The score is half population density and half inverse median income, normalised against the other tracts in your county. Every tract shows its own numbers when you open it, so you can see why it scored the way it did rather than taking a 0–100 on faith.
The overlay needs US Census data for your county, and Passport loads it for you. The first thing that needs it starts the download in the background and re-runs itself when the data lands — it takes a minute or two and only happens once per county. The Overview tab shows what is loaded and can reload it.
Draw your areas
Press Draw area (or the green button in the corner of the map) and click the map to place points; click the first point again, or press Enter, to close the shape. Backspace removes the last point and Escape cancels. Four clicks draw a rectangle, so there is one tool rather than two. Once an area exists, Split carves it into pieces with a comparable door count each, entirely from the keyboard. Zoom in to a neighbourhood first: an area can be at most 250 km².
On a phone it is the same tool: tap to place each point, then tap Finish. The map still pans while you draw, so an area can be larger than the screen.
When you save an area, Passport estimates how many doors it holds by intersecting it with census tracts. Treat it as approximate: it is very good on established streets and less good on a new subdivision the census has not caught up with. You can always type a number over it.
Splitting a big area
Open an area and use Split into N pieces. It divides by door count, not acreage — an equal-area split of a tract that is half housing estate and half farmland hands one team four hundred homes and another a field. Splitting by doors gives every team a comparable morning.
Merging
Select two or more areas from the list and merge them. If they do not touch, Passport still merges them and tells you so — two blocks either side of a river is a perfectly reasonable single route.
Hand areas to teams
Create a team, add people to it, and assign areas from the area panel. Everyone on the team gets a message with the area name and its door count.
A GoReach team is its own thing, not a serving rota: members are people, not user accounts, because most Saturday volunteers have never logged into Passport and never will.
Get your teams out of the door
Print team route sheets produces one page per team: numbered stops with tick boxes, a map of each area, the door count, and a QR code to turn-by-turn directions. There is a second QR at the top of each sheet that opens that team's live page.
That live page — the volunteer link — is the part worth understanding. It needs no login and no app. Text it to your team and each person sees only their own areas, with a big counter, a Mark this area complete button and a Navigate button. It keeps working when the signal drops; anything they tap is saved on the phone and sent when they are back in range.
Links expire on their own and you can revoke one instantly if somebody stops volunteering.
Watch it come in
The Overview panel shows doors done, percentage complete, estimated people reached, and every team's progress, updating as counts arrive from the field. The Coverage Heatmap shows the same work as density rather than as areas, which is the better view for spotting the streets nobody has reached.
Finish, and keep the map
When the campaign is done, use Finish & start a new event. It freezes the final numbers into your history and resets the counts — but keeps your areas and your team assignments. Next Easter starts from the map you already drew instead of a blank city.
Next steps
- Prospect Follow-Ups — what happens to the people your team actually meets at the door.
- Coverage Heatmap — where your outreach has landed, and where it has not.
- Nearby View — prospects near where a volunteer is standing, on the mobile app.