A hail footprint is a map of where hail fell. It is not a map of damaged roofs, and the distance between those two things is where storm canvassing is won and lost — by crews, and by the homeowners they talk to. Every step below is built around keeping that distinction honest: the data says where to look, the ground says whether the data was right, and only the inspection says what a particular roof needs.
This is a day-by-day plan for the month after a hailstorm, written for the field side — crew leads and reps working the doors. The targeting argument for using a validated footprint instead of a county alert is in storm damage leads; the restoration contractor’s version of the same event is in storm restoration leads. This page assumes you have a footprint and gets you from there to the porch.
Disclosure: Scout Data is our product. Hail and wind footprints landing on the map within hours of an event, with the date and maximum hail class by street and the owner’s name on each home, is what Scout does for a storm crew. The plan works with a footprint from any source and a clipboard; it does not work without a footprint at all.
Nothing on this page is insurance, claims or legal advice. Local soliciting rules and what a contractor may say about a policyholder’s claim vary by state and municipality — confirm both for the area you are working before a crew rolls.
Hours 0–24: verify the footprint on the ground
The first job is not knocking. It is finding out whether the map is right, and where inside it the hail was heaviest — because a hail cell is a band, not a circle, and two streets half a mile apart routinely had different storms.
Drive the footprint with the windows down and look at the things that show hail before a roof does. Soft metals are the tell: dented gutters and downspouts, dinged mailboxes, air-conditioner condenser fins flattened on the storm-facing side, splatter marks on painted surfaces and electrical boxes, window screens with holes. Look at the ground: stripped leaves and shredded shrubs, piles of granules at the bottom of downspouts. Note the direction the marks face — hail arrives at an angle, and the slopes that took the brunt are the ones facing the storm.
Grade what you see by block, not by footprint. A simple three-way scale is enough: heavy (soft-metal damage on most houses), light (some marks, mostly on exposed metal), none (the map says hail, the street says otherwise). The “none” blocks are the most valuable finding of the day, because they are the blocks the whole rest of the plan will skip.
Two things this pass does not do. It does not get on a roof — that is the inspection, and it needs the homeowner. And it does not knock: a rep who starts conversations before the crew knows which blocks confirmed will spend the best hours of the window on the wrong streets.
Days 1–3: build the route from the blocks that confirmed
Now sort. Inside the heavy and light blocks, three fields decide which doors come first:
- Roof age. An older roof takes damage that a new one shrugs off, and it is the one most likely to be a replacement rather than a repair. Permit history is the cleanest source — a roof permitted last year is a stop, not a lead. Where there is no permit, the block’s build years are the fallback, and how to find homes with old roofs covers how far to trust each.
- Owner-occupied. The person who answers a rental’s door cannot authorise a roof or file a claim. In our canvassing data renters answer 11.8% of all logged knocks — nearly a third of the conversations a rep starts — so a file that flags ownership before the knock saves a third of the porch time.
- Exposure. The slopes facing the storm, the blocks the ground pass graded heavy, the homes with no tree cover on that side.
Route by block and assign crews to blocks, not to territories. A footprint cuts across whatever sales map the company drew in January, and the block that matters most is usually the one nobody owns. A crew that walks a street end to end books more than a crew that drives between scattered addresses, and it is visible doing it — which is its own opener on the next street.
Timing inside the day matters more than most storm crews allow for. Across 237,329 logged door outcomes in our canvassing data, someone answered 31.5% of knocks in the 9 a.m. hour and 46.2% in the 8 p.m. hour, with a flat plateau of 36–38% from noon to 7 p.m. Storm crews tend to knock all day and quit at dinner; the last two hours of daylight are the best hours, and inside a fresh footprint they are the hours the competition has already gone home. Door knocking statistics has the full tables.
Days 2–14: the door
The homeowner knows a storm came through. The door’s job is to connect it to their roof honestly and offer the one thing a rep can actually deliver on a porch: a free look, with photos, and a straight answer.
“Hi — I’m [name] with [company]. Your block was inside the hail footprint from the storm on the [date]; we’ve been checking roofs on [street] since. I can’t tell you anything about yours from down here, but I can get up and look, take photos, and tell you straight whether there’s anything up there or not. Would you mind?”
“I can’t tell you anything about yours from down here” is the line that separates this crew from the one that came through yesterday saying every roof on the street was totalled. It is true, it lowers the stakes of the yes, and it sets up the inspection as a verdict rather than a pitch. The full set of storm-door lines and the objections that come with them — the adjuster already came, we already filed, not interested — is in roofing sales scripts.
Then the inspection, which is the product. Photograph the roof the way a claim would need it: a wide shot of each slope so every close-up can be located, then close-ups with a chalk circle or a coin for scale, then the soft metals on the same elevation. Give the homeowner the photos whatever the verdict. A roof with nothing on it gets “you’re fine, here are the pictures” — and that homeowner is the referral on the next block.
Three lines that never get said at this door, however well they work for a week: that the roof is damaged before anyone has been on it; anything about what insurance will cover, pay or approve; and anything about the deductible. The last one is prohibited outright in a number of states and is the fastest way a local company earns a storm chaser’s reputation.
Days 2–14: log more than the outcome
A storm canvass produces the best training data a roofing company ever gets, and most of it is thrown away. For every door, log the block grade from the ground pass, what the inspection found (nothing, cosmetic, functional), the roof material, and the roughly-known age. Two weeks later that log answers questions the footprint could not: how far below the heavy blocks the damage actually reached, which materials on this event took it and which did not, and what age of roof turned a footprint into a replacement.
The same log is what keeps the next storm honest. A company that knows its own hit rate by block grade and roof age stops knocking the light blocks on the next event and starts on the heavy ones two days earlier.
Days 14–30: after the first wave
By the second week every roofer in a four-hour radius is on the same streets, homeowners are fielding comparison quotes, and the door conversation has become a price conversation. The right move is not to fight for the saturated blocks; it is to come back to the footprint with a different sort.
- The no-answers. Roughly two of every three doors a rep walks to reach nobody — 63.0% in our data. On a heavy block that is most of the street, and most of them were never contacted by anyone. Work them in the evening plateau.
- The “fine for now” roofs. Inspected, cosmetic damage, homeowner deferred. A follow-up a month later, with the photos from the first visit, is a different conversation from a cold knock.
- The patched roofs. A repair permit on a twenty-year-old roof inside the footprint is a replacement conversation that has not happened yet.
This is also where the footprint pays off differently by state. In the hail belt, insurance-funded replacement resets the roofing clock early — the median observed interval between roofing permits on the same home is 9 years in Texas and 10 in Colorado, against 16 in Florida, in our permit data. A footprint in Texas contains a lot of roofs that were replaced after the last storm and are not due; the permit date is what separates them from the ones that are. Roof replacement statistics has the state table.
What happens after the yes
The canvass ends at a signed agreement and an open claim, and a different process starts — one that runs on the claim’s clock rather than the crew’s, and that has its own rules about who does what. Insurance restoration sales process walks that pipeline from inspection to final invoice, and roofing insurance supplement basics covers the documentation that decides whether the roof the crew actually found gets paid for. Both start with the photos taken at the door, which is one more reason the inspection is the product.
Frequently asked questions
Does being inside a hail footprint mean a roof is damaged?
No, and the whole canvass depends on not pretending otherwise. A footprint records where hail of a given size was detected or reported. Whether any one roof was damaged depends on the hail that actually reached it, the material, its age, the pitch and the direction the storm came from — none of which the footprint knows. The footprint tells you where to look. The inspection tells you what you found.
How soon after a hailstorm should you start knocking?
Verification first, knocking second — usually within the first two or three days. The first hours are for confirming on the ground that the footprint is real and finding where inside it the hail was heaviest; the days after that are for working the blocks that confirmed. A crew that skips verification and knocks the whole alert area on day one burns the best days of the window on untouched streets.
What should a rep say about insurance at a storm door?
Nothing beyond declining to discuss it. A rep at a door cannot say what a policy covers, whether a claim is worth filing or what an adjuster will approve, and in several states what a contractor may do on a policyholder’s claim is restricted by law. The door offers a free inspection with photos. What happens with the claim stays between the homeowner, their insurer and their adjuster.
How long does a hail footprint stay worth canvassing?
Longer than the first wave suggests. The saturation window — when every roofer in a four-hour radius is on the same streets — closes in a couple of weeks, but the footprint keeps producing for months: homeowners who deferred, claims that reopened, roofs patched instead of replaced. Keep it in the working list, re-sort it against roof age and ownership, and work it again when the chasers have left.