SimpleIndex Tips & Tricks – Canvassing and Political Surveys Processing
The Clipboard is Back: Why Paper Canvassing Wins in Local Campaigns (and How to Automate the Data Entry)
It’s election season, and campaigns are hitting the pavement. While consultants push for mobile canvassing apps, any field organizer knows the reality: apps crash, devices die, and volunteers – especially older ones – frequently rebel against new software. That is why the clipboard remains the backbone of local grassroots politics. The real bottleneck isn’t the clipboard itself; it’s the massive boxes of paper surveys sitting at headquarters waiting for exhausted staff to manually type thousands of responses into a spreadsheet before election day.
We built a new Political Canvassing Demonstration Job for SimpleIndex to completely eliminate that data entry bottleneck. By running your stacks of returned paper surveys through a standard desktop scanner, the software processes the pages in batches and extracts the voter data in seconds. It is the perfect hybrid solution for campaigns that want the undeniable ease of paper on the doorstep but need clean, digital data ready for immediate CRM or database import.
What makes this workflow incredibly powerful is SimpleIndex’s dual-engine capability. In a single pass, it uses OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) to instantly read candidate support checkboxes, alongside ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition) to extract hand-printed text like updated phone numbers or email addresses. Best of all, unlike cloud-based mobile apps that charge per-user licensing fees, a single SimpleIndex license handles unlimited scans.
Contact your SimpleIndex representative or download SimpleIndex 11.4 today to get a demo of SimpleIndex’s for all your canvassing work!
