You can learn more about telephone town hall meetings at our sister-company, Monarch Broadcast Messaging.
Telephone town hall services are provided to candidates, office holders, non-profit organizations, and corporations, to reach out to thousands of people simultaneously. It is the only interactive technology available that can mass-invite and accommodate large numbers of people to participate in a super-teleconference.
Town hall teleconferences bring the benefits of live interactive town hall meetings to the comfort of homes and offices. Rather than a physical town hall meeting that involves scheduling, reservations, and traveling for all participants, a telephone town hall meeting can be set up easily using advanced teleconferencing technology. The service is used by elected officials and candidates who are interested in staying in touch with the voters and by non-profits to inform their membership of latest news and to take questions about policy issues and developments.
The advantage of the service is that it can be set up quickly, easily and everyone can participate, regardless of the weather, without leaving the comfort of their home or office. The teleconference can invite individuals who use both landline or cell phones and includes several optional features such as Q&A and instant polling capabilities. While physical town hall meetings have a limited seating capability, seating at most several hundred people, telephone town hall meetings can accommodate anywhere from several thousand to upwards of a hundred thousand people at a time. It is the only technology that has the ability to interactively connect that many people at once. Not only does the technology provide a tremendous convenience for the leaders and listeners, but the leaders can select and target the exact constituencies they are interested in engaging.
For instance, a leader who is interested in discussing issues that involve senior citizens, can set up the town hall teleconference to call only senior citizens. Invitations are sent out by phone calls which are automatically delivered by the thousands every minute. Those who answer the phones at home receive a recorded message that invites them to participate and join the teleconference by pressing their keypad. If they are not interested, they can just hang up. The entire process is opt-in, and leaders can effectively get tens of thousands of interested participants on the teleconference in minutes.
The telephone town hall conference starts when the system begins dialing the phones numbers on your call list. Each recipient hears a brief recorded message that invites them to your teleconference. Should they choose to participate, they only need to stay on the line to be put into the conference. For calls that go to voicemail, rather than a live answer, your recorded message will be left indicating the nature of the call.
Your participants can press “0” to indicate they would like to ask a question, and they will be put into a question queue. You will be able to see the name and location of every individual in the Q&A queue, and will control who and when they will talk live and be heard by everyone on the call. Should you need information about the question topic, a member of your team can momentarily pull the caller out of the conference to get additional information, and then return them to the teleconference.
You also have the option to conduct a survey or poll with everyone on the teleconference, by posing questions and having participants input their answers by pressing keys on their keypad. (For example, “If you are in favor of lower taxes, press #1. If you are in favor of higher taxes, press #2.) Response results are immediately available to you, and also recorded in a database record for each participant.
Any individual that didn’t get the opportunity to ask their question can be transferred to voicemail, at your discretion, to pose their question or leave comments. Those messages and the appropriate contact information are recorded and sent to you or your designated representative for further action.
The system is already in place so there is no need to buy any hardware of software to begin using the service and there is no set up fee. It’s all done online and billing is done on a pay as you go basis and there are no overhead or maintenance costs. Telephone town hall services will continue to grow in popularity because it is the best way to reach thousands of people instantly at a fraction of what postage would cost to send direct mail. But more importantly, you can actually stay ahead of the informational curve and get the proper information out those people whose opinions count, while interacting with them in personal way. At present, it’s the best way to establish a relationship with your constituents and/or members.
For more information on telephone town hall services call 888-3878636, or visit the service page here.