PDI Mobile Connect Reviews

This is a great idea, but the execution is awful! Updating is so slow that I’d be better off using pen, paper, and carrier pigeon. Today was completely wasted, because I only had a couple of hours to walk, and spent the entire time trying to get PDI to cough up my assignment list. This is a recurring nightmare, experienced by all of our walkers. It just sits there on “updating assignments...” for so long that you want to tear your hair out. Not a question of internet speed, at least on our end, because this happens even with high speed connectivity. Deleting and re-installing PDI appears to help sometimes, but that’s also time-consuming. And when it does work, it takes precious seconds waiting for the next screen to load. Hard to cover ground when you spend so much time waiting for PDI .

It sure beats a clipboard with paper precinct lists! If they’d just fix a few bugs in Version 8.2 (the occasional crash when Syncing, especially if HQ changes your turf while you’re canvassing it; switching All/Odd/Even while in Street View opens a different street; I’ve reported them all) it’d be great. I use it on an old iPhone with no cellular service, so I like that after I download my assignments via WiFi, it just works out in the field and Syncs when I’m back on a WiFi connection.

It’s so great to see what houses to go to and who lives there. The rest is truly terrible. Data collection is just horrible and the user can not tell if anything was collected at all. It takes 8 clicks to record that you reached someone and then you have to stand and wait for the data to be uploaded. You have no way to tell if it worked no way to see what you recorded. As a candidate I have zero access to my own data. I walked for two days and recorded nothing. No error handling. As someone who worked in software PDI is Wry poorly executed.

PDI crashes a lot when trying to load a page. It gets to the point where I can’t even use it for canvassing on my phone. I’ve deleted and reinstalled PDI several times. It works maybe 3 times and then it begins crashing again. It’s needs a fix.

Latest update backed out the “done with whole household” button that was crashing PDI , so that’s good although it would have been a good feature if it had worked. Extra steps back and forth to add info and comments are tedious but doable. A flag for non-English speakers would be nice. Really helpful would be for stats to show how many actual conversations happened, now just records number of doors knocked whether anyone was at home or not.

The concept of PDI is amazing but PDI still needs a lot of work to get there. I have been using PDI for around 6 months now and it constantly keeps booting me off. This is especially annoying when you are canvassing or really needing to keep if an assignment was loaded really quickly. I continue to use it to “save to time” but it seems to me that I waste more of my time logging in than actually using PDI . I really do hope this app can solve these problems because this is INSANE!!!

PDI is so slow in execution. It takes forever to upload data and often freezes on the screen, unsure of whether the program is advancing or not. We have had to wait for 20 or 30 minutes at times to wait for information to sync up and allow us to cover ground in our canvassing efforts. My hope is that PDI developers are able to update and work past these annoying kinks.

This tool makes canvassing much easier. The different map/street views are very much appreciated. I was shocked at how unstable it was, especially while synchronizing. Please consider reworking the disposition UX: use a popup with radio buttons, and bring up a “Apply to household” button when there are N people there. (Marking a house of five as being NH takes a minute).

Worked well on my walk. The live update is great...my partner and I could clean up the far corners of our turf effortlessly, each housecall synced on the go!

Suggestion: Ability to drop a tack where I parked a car. Important when doing subdivisions.

PDI is great. I love it. One request: add a color (orange?) for “mixed” houses - houses where at least 1 person is canvassed. Currently that house remains yellow (the not canvassed color).

When no one is home, the house color is yellow.
When people are home and canvassed , the house color is red.
When 1 person is home (canvassed) and the others are not home, the house stays yellow.

I’d rather know how many houses have “zero” contacts, and so are truly yellow, and separately see how many houses have at least 1 contact made with the household.

Thanks.

PDI is good but it desperately needs to be able to tap on a house to change its color after you visit it to know what you’ve covered.
Trying to remember 120+ houses visited in your head is almost impossible.

I've done a lot of campaigns and this app is the best interface for volunteers of any experience level. Makes my life so much easier!

Very frustrating app. Constantly crashes and even when I restart PDI or try and redownload it, the same issues continue. If I’m lucky and it doesn’t crash, PDI is very slow and the constant updating as you go from place to place can slow you down immensely.

Unfortunately this is one of the only options for software for use of a political platform. The user interface and terminology is unnecessarily complicated. The program is terribly and utterly slow. Customer service is non-existent. I’m not sure if PDI deserves a whole star. Can’t wait for another option.

Consistently troubled. Lacks basic functionality.

PDI is barely functional. Constant freeze up. Frequently losing my and my coworkers stats. Losing contacts. I have to reinstall each day to use this.
If I had a say, we would never have touched PDI in the first place. I hope every future election avoids it like the plague.

I love PDI! I’ve used it twice now and it’s so easy to navigate.

Love PDI. Very easy to navigate, accessible and such a crucial and helpful tool for canvassing!

I was given PDI to use to drop door hangers for the election. However the how-to video does not work, there is not place to register or sign up and I have no log in information. Really bad app!

I used PDI today with a group of canvassers, and we all felt that it was a really useful tool.

The layout of PDI is easy enough to utilize and a much appreciated upgrade on the old methods of canvassing. With that being said, the execution is very poor. The load/refresh rate is abysmal and PDI experiences constant crashes throughout usage. I can’t believe how many times I’ve had to reinstall PDI just to get past the login page.

Also, please allow a “capture all” option for households. It’s frustrating needing to individually mark every single member of a household that isn’t home.

PDI could have great potential, but needs a lot of work.