Drawing your coverage area

Coverage is what puts you in front of a neighbor. When someone checks their address, we test their pin against every operator's drawn areas — if you haven't drawn one, you don't appear.

Drawing an area

1. Pan and zoom the map to your neighborhood.
2. Use the polygon tool to click a corner at a time around the streets you'll serve, then close the shape back at the first point.
3. Save area.

The buttons in the corner of the map switch what you're drawing over. Street is the tidy default, Detailed adds more buildings and house numbers, and Aerial is photography from above. Aerial is worth a look before you commit a boundary — it shows fences, cul-de-sacs and the back of a subdivision as they really are, which is where a line drawn on a plain street map tends to be wrong.

You can draw more than one — a second, separate block a few streets over is a second area, not a bigger first one.

Editing and deleting

Drawn areas can be dragged, reshaped point by point, or deleted. Save after every change; nothing is stored until you do.

The list under the map is alphabetical by area name, so naming them after the neighborhoods they cover keeps it easy to scan. Areas you haven't named sit at the bottom, in the order you drew them.

Drawing it well

Zoom in and switch to Detailed while you draw. At the zoom that fits your whole area you are placing corners against a blur of colour; a few steps closer the individual houses appear with their numbers, and you can see exactly which side of the street a corner has landed on.

• Follow streets, not radiuses. A circle around your house will include the far side of a main road you'd never cross.
• Be honest about walking distance. A kid with a can does maybe a couple of blocks comfortably. Over-drawing means declining people later.
• Mind the boundaries. Coverage decides who can even see you, so a pin one house outside your polygon gets told nobody serves them.