TL;DR — A lead is a new contact a volunteer captures in the field. The app matches it against your existing people, and once a reviewer approves the match, the lead becomes a confirmed identified voter.

What it is

A lead is a newly captured, unverified contact a volunteer records from the field — someone they met or spoke to (a neighbour, a friend, a co-worker, a family member) whom the campaign wants to add to its supporter base. A lead starts life as raw contact details; the job from there is to work out whether that person is already in your voter file and, once a reviewer confirms it, promote them to an identified voter.

Think of a lead as the front of the voter-identification pipeline: a volunteer says “I know this person,” and the app and your reviewers turn that into a confirmed match against the people already in your people list.

graph LR
    C[Volunteer captures<br/>a lead] --> M[App suggests<br/>candidate matches]
    M --> R[Reviewer approves<br/>the right match]
    R --> V[Identified voter<br/>in your people list]

    style C fill:#fff4e6,stroke:#ff9800,stroke-width:2px
    style M fill:#f5f5f5,stroke:#666,stroke-width:2px
    style R fill:#e1f5ff,stroke:#0066cc,stroke-width:3px
    style V fill:#e1f5ff,stroke:#0066cc,stroke-width:2px

What’s in a lead

A lead holds the captured person’s details, plus a little context about who recorded them:

  • Name and contact details — email, home phone, and cell phone.
  • Address — where they live (optional).
  • Relationship — how the volunteer knows them: neighbour, co-worker, friend, family, community member, or other.
  • A note — any extra context worth passing on.
  • Who captured it — the volunteer who recorded the lead.

To create a lead, a volunteer needs at least a name and one way to reach the person.

From lead to identified voter

Every lead follows the same short path — capture, match, then confirm.

1. Capture

A volunteer records a new contact while out in the field. The lead is saved straight away and joins the review queue.

2. Match

The moment a lead is saved, the app searches the people already in your people list for anyone who might be the same person. Each suggestion — a candidate match — is ranked by confidence, based on what lined up:

What matchedConfidence
Phone and addressExact
Email and addressExact
PhoneHigh
Address onlyMedium
Name onlyLow

A matching phone and address is the strongest signal; a name on its own is the weakest. The strongest signal wins for each person, and a single lead can turn up several competing suggestions to choose between.

3. Review and confirm

Someone then reviews the suggestions and approves the right one — or rejects them all if it’s a genuinely new person. Who reviews decides whether it sticks:

  • A volunteer’s approve or reject is recorded as their opinion, but it doesn’t settle anything — the lead keeps waiting for sign-off.
  • An organiser, admin, or owner has the final say. When one of them approves a match, the app locks it in: the lead becomes an identified voter in your people list, and the other competing suggestions are cleared away automatically.

The thing to remember: a lead is a candidate until someone with the authority confirms it. A volunteer can flag the likely match, but it takes an organiser, admin, or owner to make it final.

Tracking the pipeline

Leads also give you a read on field progress. Each volunteer can be set a lead target — a goal, say 40 — and the app counts their lead captures as they go. An organiser’s pipeline overview brings the team together at a glance:

  • Lead captures — how many leads each volunteer has recorded.
  • Identified voters — leads confirmed by a binding approval.
  • Pending review — leads with no match yet, or a match still waiting for an organiser, admin, or owner to sign off.

Organisers see only their own volunteers, and volunteers don’t see this overview.

How it relates

  • People — a person in your people list is an established voter-file record; a lead is an unverified candidate that may or may not turn out to be one of them. Approving the match is the bridge between the two — it folds the lead into your people.
  • User roles — volunteers capture leads; organisers, admins, and owners confirm them.
  • vs. a Recruiter — a recruiter owns the voters they personally sign up and works from an SMS link, while a lead is captured by a signed-in volunteer and flows through this review pipeline. Different mechanism, different person.

Terms

  • Lead — a newly captured, unverified contact from the field.
  • Candidate match — an existing person a lead might be.
  • Confidence — how strongly a candidate matches (Exact, High, Medium, or Low).
  • Identified voter — a lead whose match has been confirmed and added to your people list.
  • Lead target / captures — a volunteer’s goal, and how many leads they’ve recorded.
  • How it fits together — where leads sit among the building blocks.
  • Lists — the voter file leads are matched against and folded into.
  • User roles — who captures and confirms leads.