The disciplined effort helped turn around Labor's fortunes, improving early polling that suggested the party was in trouble, and building an undercurrent of grassroots support that confounded political commentators sure that a swing to the Liberals was on.

Field campaigns - doorknocking, stalls, phone calls, letter boxing - have always been a staple of the ACT's election campaigns.

But Labor's effort in 2016 was an evolution in volume and strategy, the first time its groundwork has been "thoroughly planned".

It attempted 900,000 conversations with voters, including 400,000 doorknocks and 500,000 phone calls. About 305,000 of those attempts were successful.

Discipline was key. The teams of all 25 candidates were asked to follow the same broad strategy, stick to their own defined patch, and feed information back to the campaign's central command about their encounters with voters.

It's something Labor has struggled with in past elections, when candidates have often run disparate and disjointed campaigns.

A field campaign of this size and nature also required enormous cultural change within ACT Labor, according to secretary Matthew Byrne.

"I can say early on there was resistance in the party to it," he said.

"It's a culture that's built up over time, that that's not how you do things, that people only care about rational policy decisions and discussions based in traditional media.

"But I hope that after this result we've shown that that's not the case, and that the only way you can implement policy is by changing people's minds, and you can only do that by having conversations with people."

The cultural change was, in part, forced down Labor's throat by an organised and invigorated Liberal opposition, and early polling that told Labor the election would be extremely close.

A strong field campaign was also viewed as a good strategy in the context of growing community cynicism of government and political parties, and the waning influence of traditional media.

It began with a broad sweep of the city. Information collected through the doorknocking and phone calls was fed back to the party's central headquarters, and used to better target undecided voters, or wavering Labor or Liberal supporters.

Homes were hit twice or three times, with the underlying philosophy that building relationships between candidates and voters was crucial.

The messaging content was deliberately different to prior campaigns. Candidates were told to focus on personal stories, rather than dry policy discussions. Quality conversations that engendered empathy and built rapport between voter and candidate.

Their personal backgrounds were linked with values and a vision during repeated face-to-face conversations.

Here, Labor drew on lessons from interstate and abroad. A significant influence came from Wellstone, a Minnesota-based progressive strategic training organisation, which has been used in other ALP campaigns.

The best individual campaigns were generally mounted by those with the best story to tell - Suzanne Orr, for example, who grew up in a family that fostered more than 200 children.

Labor says the strategy helped gradually improve polling results until Labor had a healthy lead over the opposition weeks out from the election on October 15. It was aided by a strong social media campaign, and the efforts of UnionsACT, which ran its own field and advertising campaigns.

Each candidate's number of first preference votes is said to directly correlate with their field efforts and face-to-face contact with voters.

"To get people to actually sign up to the idea of actually going out there and slogging it out, talking to voters systematically - not just once every now and then, but a few times a week - requires a big effort, and it required a change of mindset," Mr Byrne said.

"It required candidates to have a good long think about how they were going to go about it, so they had to have a plan."

The Liberals, in their post-mortem, will likely look at Labor's field campaign as an area of weakness in their own strategy.

Two days after the election, ACT Liberal Senator Zed Seselja was already suggesting Labor's ground campaign may have contributed to the opposition's loss.

"I think there is some evidence emerging that Labor party's ground game in some areas was stronger, that they were better able to target voters," he said.