A Brief Guide to eCanvass
eCanvass is a brand new way to telephone canvass - which you can download from here. Anybody with a valid Lib Dem Membership number is allowed to download this software for free.
If you download and install the program an icon will appear on your desktop. Click this to login (via either broadband or dial-up) to a national database of by-election campaigns that you could help canvass. This is illustrated below.
Telephone canvassing is a vital campaigning tool - and eCanvass lets you do this from the comfort of your own home. You can so as little or as much as you like. You are in control.
If you get an error message when you try to log in you may need to add eCanvass to your firewall's exception list [ie in WindowsXP: click Start, Control Panel, Firewall, Exceptions and add c:\ears\eCanvass.exe].
Select a campaign from the list. Background information appears below and can be printed out.
eCanvass lets you practise the scripts on the Micky Mouse family.
When you are ready to start phoning click the green button 
and then dial. eCanvass gets the scripts and the next call from a central database.
You can either manually dial, or set eCanvass to dial automatically via your modem.
Hit Enter to exit the dial box and Click any button at the bottom to indicate the response.
On list screens such as this, just click or use up/down arrow keys to select answers.
Please ensure that the highlighted name at the top of the screen is that of the person to whom you are talking. If necessary, click or use Up/Down arrows to change to another name. You can do this at any time before the last screen - when ecanvass saves the data.
A screen such as this shows checkboxes where you can tick more than one item. You can also type additional information such as casework comments or email addresses into edit boxes on the last screen. A typical script will have two or three screens.
eCanvass saves the results back after each call. It then picks the next person to call.