What is Town Hall Teleconferencing?
Town Hall Teleconferencing is a virtual meeting over the phone that invites and engages hundreds or thousands of people simultaneously in a town hall setting. It is also known as TeleTown Hall®. The technology enables you to select the group to invite, deliver a verbal presentation and interact with participants. You can ask participants to share opinions similar to a radio talk show and conduct polling by having participants vote on issues and questions to get real time results.
Transformative Technology that Delivers Unfiltered Communication
The technology is transforming political and corporate communication because you can communicate directly with a targeted audience. Elected officials, candidates, corporate and organizational leaders can now deliver their unfiltered messages to the masses without relying on traditional media outlets. Better yet, your participants will be able to hear and interact with you in the comfort of their homes or offices, without the need to retain expensive meeting facilities or be concerned with weather conditions. It is the most practical and inexpensive way to personally communicate with a large number of people — from 50 to over a million.
Your presentation can focus on specific issues or you can have a freewheeling discussion that can cover any topic. You can interact with your audience and invite them to participate or ask questions. With this breakthrough technology, your audience can hear your voice, or those of your fellow hosts, while you get instant feedback. The only way you could replicate this level of personal communication would be door-to-door which would be costly and time-prohibitive. Experts agree that Town Hall Teleconferencing is the fastest, easiest and most effective way to reach out and communicate directly with communities, constituents, association members and corporate contacts and associates.
Big Advantage: Targeting Your Audience
In contrast to radio, television and newspapers, town hall phone conferences can be set up to target a specific audience, such as primary voters. This is a tremendous advantage when trying to utilize resources efficiently for constituent or member outreach. Also, the cost per contact is significantly lower than other media channels. The technology provides an opportunity for optional two-way communication using question and answer sessions. This provides valuable insight into your audience’s thought process and, if you choose, you can also use screeners who screen questions to help keep the conversation focused. This is a great feature and keeps your meeting within your anticipated timeframe. It also helps you to eliminate potential meeting “hijackers” who are only there to cause havoc and not provide a constructive discussion.
Conduct Live Surveys and Polling
You can also conduct live surveys during your call. Participants can use their touch tone phone to select their answer choices. It’s also important to note town hall teleconferences are opt-in only. This means that as the system dials thousands of numbers, callers opt-in to the call by just remaining on the line. If they are not interested in participating, they just need to hang up. Unlike radio and television, where there may be an audience that includes many uninterested people who “tune out,” a town hall conference engages people who are interested and want to listen. This will give you the most accurate opinions and survey results.
No Hardware or Software Needed: Everything is Online
This breakthrough technology now allows political organizations and other organizations, such as non-profits, to reach a large amount of people in much less time than ever before. Moreover, the system doesn’t require any hardware or software. Set up is quick and painless. Preparation for a town hall meeting is also minimal. For example, let’s say a certain topic has become of great interest with your constituency. Or if you are a business, a product issue has become apparent and needs immediate attention.
Very simply, the telephone town hall service enables you to upload your phone lists online and the system calls out to each number. Tens of thousands of invitation calls can be processed within minutes. People who answer the phone and hear your invitation can opt-in and join your teleconference. You can see online the number of people who are logging into your teleconference. You can start talking about the issues of the day and begin inviting your participants to press a number on their keypad to ask a live question. Questions come into an operator who can talk to the questioners and screen calls. This allows you to stay on the topics you want to focus on and not be concerned with administrative aspect of the call.
Communicate Directly with More People in a Fraction of the Time
Rather than speak to 50 or 100 or 200 people at a regular town hall meeting, you can now engage people to participate from the comfort of their homes and talk to 10,000, 20,000 or even 30,000 people at one time. You cover more ground, make it more convenient for folks to join in and you get instant feedback with the polling and survey features. Why pay pollsters thousands of dollars to conduct a survey that could take weeks or months? You can use Town Hall Teleconferencing and get the advantage of speaking to thousands of people while receiving your polling results in a fraction of the time?
Telephone town hall service will become more and more popular as elected officials, nonprofit organizations and corporate leaders discover the many advantages that the service offers. As with most areas, technology can really help the communication process. Those who embrace the change will be the ones who reap the benefits.
How to Set Up Your Town Hall Teleconference
First, give us a call at 888-387-8636 to set up an account. We can email you the rate sheet so you can see what your cost will be ahead of time. And then we’ll work with you closely to help you organize your conference. Conducting a teleconference begins by compiling a list of phone numbers of your contacts. This list can have as little as a few hundred numbers or more than 100,000. It is completely based on what your needs are as an organization.
Second, we’ll give you hands-on training so you can see for yourself how our web interface works, and how you can control your town hall conference. Feel free to ask us questions because we want you to understand all the benefits of this exciting technology.
Third, let us know when you want to start. Our robust telecommunications infrastructure will begin churning out the calls that will invite your contacts to participate in the conference. If a contact is interested in joining, he or she can remain on the line. He or she will be instantly tied into the conference. If they aren’t interested in the topic, he or she can just hang up. It’s as easy as that!
Most town hall conferences include a question and answer session. This provides for an interactive exchange between you and your participants. Based on your preference, your participants can either ask or comment directly. You also have the option to screen your calls to keep everyone on topic. While the questions are being answered, all the participants can listen in. Participants can stay in the conference if they are interested in the discussion. If they need to they can always just hang up to end their session.
Best Way to Engage and Interact with Your Audience
As the teleconference progresses, you can see in real time how many people are participating. To be able to speak with thousands of members and constituents at the same time is a major advantage for all. Your audience now has the best opportunity to hear and speak with you in the comfort of their own home. Moreover, if you oversee a networking group, an educational institution, an association or union you can use this technology for a wide variety of applications. Some ideas that others have used this technology for include: improving political outreach, polling, marketing and sales communications, or any other reason you may need that requires a powerful, convenient way to connect.
Using the service is an ideal way to host a large-scale conference that can engage the public, take instant surveys and give everyone an opportunity to provide input on major issues.
Technology is Being Embraced by PACs and Non-Profits
This technology is growing rapidly in popularity, particularly among elected officials on the state and county levels. This popularity is prompting more and more people to ask, “What is town hall teleconferencing?” Federal representatives, both in the House and Senate, have used it successfully for years. But even more so, the service is being embraced and used by non-profit and political action organizations to keep in touch with their members and constituencies. Direct marketing companies have also shown interest in communicating with their distributors.
Quite simply, it’s the most convenient and cost-effective way to keep people in the loop. You don’t have to worry about finding or renting space at a physical facility. You don’t have to consider weather or traffic conditions and you can launch your teleconference in less than 24 hours. Telephone Town Hall requires a minimal lead-time to respond quickly to important issues that pop up.
With the outreach capabilities of town hall teleconferencing, you can deliver a direct and unfiltered message that people need to hear, without having it misinterpreted by third parties or the press. That’s why political, non-profit and corporate leaders are all turning to this technology.
Our Telephone Town Hall service is one of our core offerings at Monarch Broadcast Messaging and we look forward to setting one up for you. Just give us a call at 888-387-8636 or visit out Town Hall Teleconference page for more info.