The Person You Promised to Come Back to
You were at the door in Nelsonville on a Thursday in October. The conversation went long — maybe 20 minutes. You left a Bible Teach and a brochure. You said you would come back to pick up the conversation about the topic of suffering. The person said they would think about it. You wrote the address on the back of a tract because it was the only paper you had.
Three weeks later, when you have worked through Athens and Glouster and you are planning next week's territory, you cannot find that address. You remember the street. You remember the conversation. You do not remember the house number.
The return visit record that was filled in from the doorstep, with the address, the placement, the topic, and the "When to return" timestamp, would have solved this in two minutes.
The Monthly Contact Grid as Territory Intelligence
The twelve boolean fields — Jan through Dec — are the most underappreciated part of this template. A tick in a month means you made contact with that person in that month. Looking at a record where July, August, September, and October are all ticked tells a different story from a record where only January and September are ticked. The first suggests an ongoing, developing conversation. The second suggests two years of sporadic contact with long gaps where the relationship has not progressed.
The First Contacted date pairs with this to show trajectory. Someone first contacted 14 months ago with only two ticks in the monthly grid is a contact who has been intermittently revisited but where the relationship has not developed. That context changes how you approach the next return visit and what Placement you bring.
The Placement field — Tract, Magazine, Brochure, Bible Teach, Bible, DVD, Card — is not just a record of what was left. It is a marker of where the conversation is. A contact at the Bible Teach stage is materially further along than a Tract placement. When you are deciding which contacts to prioritise for the week, the placement level is one of the primary filters.
Territory Coverage with the Map View
The Location field enables the map view that makes geographic territory management visible. Across an outreach territory that covers Athens, The Plains, Chauncey, Amesville, and Buchtel, the contacts pin to their physical addresses. Before planning a day's route, you open the map and identify which contacts are geographically clustered — the three return visits in Amesville that can be covered in the same two-hour block.
The Area field supplements this with a territory partition that lets you filter by zone for group territory coverage. If four people are working the Glouster area on Saturday morning, filtering by Area: Glouster shows every active return visit in that zone, sorted by When to Return date, so the group knows who is due for a call-back and who was only recently contacted.
The Topic for Return Visit field is the pre-commitment you make to yourself at the doorstep. You write down what you said you would talk about next time. When you are standing at the door six weeks later and trying to reconstruct where the last conversation ended, the topic field is the one that makes the return feel continuous rather than a cold call.