Case Study: MPP Glover’s Digital Town Hall on COVID-19
On April 27th, we conducted a live town hall for MPP Chris Glover of Spadina-Fort York. Our goal was to engage small businesses across Toronto to educate them about the various strategies that have already been deployed by various levels of government to support small businesses. Additionally, we wanted to get feedback from the attendees on the matter.
In this case study, we’ll cover the following:
- The goals / inspiration behind the digital town hall
- Process / implementation
- Outcomes
- Learnings / New features we’re adding
Goals / What inspired us to do a digital town hall
MPP Glover approached us with the desire to address small businesses that have been impacted negatively due to COVID-19. The theme of the engagement being Saving Main Street, referring to the host of restaurants, bars, salons, theatres, book stores and much more that line the prominent streets of downtown Toronto (and beyond). MPP Glover also intended to have 2 other MPPs from downtown Toronto, along with the Executive Director of TABIA.
We quickly identified the ideal solution for MPP Glover’s engagement to be a live, digital town hall. The goal would be to be able to share context on the situation facing small businesses, while giving viewers an easy way to ask questions live during the town hall.
Process / implementation
We implemented this engagement as a live digital town hall broadcast hosted at this link. Users were invited via email and social media posts made by MPP Glover’s office. Users would open the shared link that led to a pre-loader page which indicated when the town hall was starting. At the outset of town hall, the screen auto loaded the live cast along with showing a panel for viewers to be able to ask questions of the panelists.
The questions were shown live to MPP Glover’s assistant who was viewing the incoming questions and approving those that were relevant and appropriate. This implementation allowed for a branded and visually relevant experience, allowing all 4 panelists to join the call easily, and broadcast with support for as many users as would show up to the link (our platform has no user cap).
As our first implementation of it’s kind, we learned a great deal about what makes for a successful digital town hall. We’ll cover our learnings (and features we’ll be adding) in the last section.
Outcomes
The Saving Main Street town hall was a great success for the MPP’s office. The engagement was attended live by over 100 viewers and a we gathered almost 50 questions from viewers. With minimal effort required to setup the engagement, the turnout/results were quite fruitful. The panelists were satisfied with the turnout, the conversations had and questions addressed for concerned small-business owners in Toronto.
Learnings / New features we’re adding
As our first live digital town hall implementation, we were very happy with the results. However, inevitably a number of learnings and ideas surfaced as we worked through the challenges, mistakes & opportunities of running a live digital town hall. The following were the learnings (and relevant features to add to our platform):
- Pre event landing page: we realized we can do a lot of work to utilize this page to connect with those interested in attending (timer to show when the event will take place, signup for a reminder email/text message functionality)
- User identity in engagement: users can join as anonymous users, or identified community members. Based on admin preference and user comfort, the ideal balance can be easily reached
- Timed polls: polls managed by admin can be released for limited time voting during the live event (e.g. 10 min for voting on topic x)
- Crowd sourced engagement: depending on the engagement, it could be useful to add a section for users to share stories, ideas, questions. These can be moderated by admin.
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