Beacon re-orders the walk list by street so each canvasser walks the shortest sensible path — not a list in import-row order. Priority leads weight to the front. (Under the hood: a nearest-neighbor + 2-opt TSP solver, if you care.)
— Capabilities
The walk list ships with route order baked in. Tap any contact for turn-by-turn handoff to your phone's maps app. Priority leads ride at the top of the route.
/01 — SOLVER
Builds a short, sensible route across every door on the list, then trims the obvious detours. (Nearest-neighbor seeds a tour, 2-opt iteratively improves it.) A typical walk list finishes in well under a second.
/02 — PRIORITY
High-score leads, hot tags, or VIPs weight earlier in the route. Priority doors get knocked while the canvasser still has the energy to nail the pitch.
/03 — HANDOFF
The route renders on the mobile map with stop numbers and distance to next door. Tap a contact, hand off to Apple Maps or Google Maps for navigation.
— Why it matters
An unsorted walk list zigzags. Canvassers cross the street four times when they should cross once. On a 100-door shift that's an hour of pure walking time you don't get back. The solver runs once and the order respects the grid.
— How a route gets built
Run it once at campaign launch. Re-run it whenever the universe changes.
/01
Choose campaign and turf. Beacon loads every contact in the walk list with its geocoded position.
/02
Solver runs in-browser. Nearest-neighbor builds an initial tour, 2-opt prunes the obvious detours. The route paints onto the map.
/03
Canvassers see the ordered list with stop numbers and distance markers. Tap-to-navigate hands off to the phone's maps app.
/04
Add canvassers, drop a turf, swap a list — re-optimize. The route updates and the mobile sync picks it up.
— FAQ
Q / 01
Nearest-neighbor seeds a route and 2-opt iteratively swaps stops to shorten the path. It's the standard pragmatic TSP heuristic — not provably optimal, but very close in practice.
Q / 02
Lead score, tags, and statuses can each be configured to weight a contact earlier in the route. Set the rules at the campaign level once, they apply on every re-run.
Q / 03
Both. The solver minimizes geographic distance, which works either way. The mobile map hands off to Apple Maps or Google Maps for actual turn-by-turn.
Q / 04
The built-in solver runs up to ~500 contacts in well under a second. Larger or constraint-heavy operations (time windows, capacity) can flip on an backend solver.
— Start optimizing
Open an account, import a list, click optimize. Hand the phone to the canvasser. The route is there waiting.