By some serendipity while I had my car radio scanning stations, I heard a story about a company offering the opportunity to hold massive conference calls.
A company called TeleTownHall uses voice over internet protocol connected to their technology to enable you to call up to 30,000 people in seconds. When people answer, they are asked to hold the line if they would like to participate in a townhall meeting. According to the website, 30,000 calls yields between 4-6,000 participants.
The service is marketed mostly to politicians and business executives, but it doesn’t take much imagination to see how it could be used to solicit feedback or survey your community in order to discover how you can better serve them. You can also limit the calls to patrons and donors or similar membership groups.
You can keep control of the thousands of voices you have invited via a web interface.
A Web-based control screen enables the VIP to see the name and location of every person they are speaking with, and to invite each person to ask a question or to raise a concern. As dialogue begins, everyone can hear both the VIP and the selected speaker. In addition to this feature, the VIP can choose to pose questions to the entire group, and tally the answers that the audience gives via touchtone response on their telephone keypads
When it is all over, you receive a report of who participated, who answered the survey questions and what the results were.
They bill the service as being affordable but given that their primary clients have people donating $1500.00 at a time pop, that may be a relative term. There is no mention of what their rates may actually be. This may be an exercise arts organization can do periodically as grant funding for surveying allows.
Joe,
I just wanted to make your group aware of our very cost competitive and technologically advance virtual townhall solution, TeleForum. More information can be found on our web site at http://www.broadnet.us, or please email me at tsheffer at broadnet.us.