Set up the campaign.
Pick the office (school board, city council, state house, etc.), the geography (a county, a set of precincts, a district), and the scope of voters you care about (everyone, registered Democrats, registered Republicans, NPAs, a mix).
Motion51 takes that scope and loads the matching Florida voter file rows behind the scenes. There's no spreadsheet to import. The whole step takes about 10 minutes.
- Office and race year.
- Geography — county, precincts, or a custom polygon.
- Party / voter scope (the "Eligible Voter Pool").
- Brand color — just for the campaign's volunteer login screen.
Draw turf.
"Turf" is just a chunk of the district assigned to a specific volunteer for a specific shift. In Motion51, you draw turf two ways: drag a polygon on the map, or pick a list of streets.
As you draw, the app shows a running count: how many addresses are inside the polygon, how many registered voters live there, and how that breaks down by party. You can tighten or loosen the shape until the count fits your shift — 50 doors for a 2-hour shift, 80 for an afternoon, etc.
Each turf you save becomes assignable to one or more volunteers.
Add volunteers.
You add each volunteer's name and the app generates a 4-digit PIN. Volunteers don't need an email, an app store account, or a password.
You text them their PIN and a link to the site. They tap the link, type their name and PIN, and they're in. Their view shows only the turf you've assigned them — not the rest of the campaign, not other volunteers' work.
Run a shift.
The volunteer opens the site, signs in, and sees a map of their turf with each door marked. A briefing card at the top has the campaign's "what to say" pinned where it can't get lost.
They tap a door, see who lives there (name, party if relevant, prior visit notes), knock, and tap a response code: supportive, leaning, undecided, opposed, not home, moved, do-not-contact. The next door auto-loads.
If signal drops mid-block, the app keeps working. Responses are saved locally and synced back the moment the phone reconnects. Volunteers don't have to think about it.
Watch the live HQ map.
While shifts are running, the campaign manager has a live HQ map open in a browser. Every volunteer shows up as a dot. Every knocked door turns the right color (green supportive, orange leaning, gray not home, etc.) the moment the response is recorded.
That's the room where mid-shift coaching happens: if a volunteer hasn't moved in 40 minutes, you check in. If one route is moving twice as fast as another, you reassign. The live map is the difference between "I'll see the numbers tomorrow" and "I can fix this right now."
Export the data.
At the end of the cycle — or earlier, whenever you want a snapshot — you can export every knock and every response code as a single CSV. One row per contact attempt, with all the context: voter, date, volunteer, response, notes.
For paid tiers, there's a second export: a filtered direct-mail list. You pick filters (party, vote history, response code, super-voter, geography), the app builds a CSV that's mail-merge ready, and your mail vendor can run it as-is.