Every field program answers the same three questions: who are we talking to, where do they live, and who’s knocking which doors? Romulus treats those as one pipeline — segment, universe, turf — and most of the bad Saturdays in field organizing come from tools that treat them as three.

Build the segment

It starts in the voter file. The segment builder is the filter panel on the Voters desk: stack conditions across the file — party, vote history, geography, age, contact history, your own custom fields, and voter scores — and watch the count update as you narrow. Bulk actions work on whatever you’ve built, so tagging a segment or adding it to a phone bank doesn’t mean exporting and re-importing a spreadsheet.

A filter you’ll use once is just a filter. The ones you’ll use all cycle, you save.

Save it as a universe

A universe is a named, reusable filter set — “Persuadable independents, D5,” built once and shared with the whole campaign. The important part is that a universe is a definition, not a snapshot: it re-evaluates every time you open it, so as voters get contacted, move, or fall off the file, the universe stays true without anyone maintaining it. (Lighter-weight saved filters become call lists for the phone bank.)

That live re-evaluation is also how we attack the oldest embarrassment in field: the voter who never gets a knock. Point a universe at never-contacted voters and it refills itself as the campaign works — an always-fresh pool to draw from, instead of the same well-worn streets.

Cut the turf

Turf splits a universe into geographic chunks a single canvasser can reasonably knock in one shift — a name, an assigned voter list, an optional map polygon, an optional script, and notes for the canvasser (“stay on the east side of Main”).

Two ways to cut one:

  • From the map — draw a polygon and Romulus auto-assigns every voter inside it.
  • From a filter — any segment or universe becomes a turf with Save as turf; no polygon required, draw one later if you like.

Assignments aren’t frozen. Move edge-of-polygon households between turfs whenever the cut needs adjusting, and hit Re-evaluate to bring a turf back in line with its universe. Turfs land in the Canvasser app as maps and walk lists, with the script on screen at the door.

Watch it move

The turf list shows what a field director actually asks: voter count, contacted-in-the-last-30-days, percent complete, last canvass. Click into a turf for a color-coded contact-age map, outcome breakdowns, script response summaries, and per-canvasser session stats — so the Sunday reallocation is a decision, not an argument.

The full detail lives in the docs: the voter file and universes and field & turf. If you’d rather see it on your own district, request a demo — we’ll cut real turf on the call.