Featur e
Telephone Town Halls Are A Big Hit in Canada
By Andrew Harris A
fter living in Ottawa for five years working for the Conservative Party of Canada, I decided that three federal elections, twenty odd by-
elections, a provincial election, and a municipal elec- tion were more than enough campaigning any sensible person should ever do. So I moved back to Toronto to get out of the political game. In spring of 2009 I was asked if I would work on the Tim Hudak leadership campaign.
It had been about four months since I was part of
any sort of campaign, so of course I said yes. I was tasked with running the central direct voter contact program, a key component in leading Tim Hu- dak to victory. The strategy included a number of pre- viously successful means of reaching out to former, es- tablished, and new members of the Ontario PC party. Through phone banks, direct mail, FRAN campaigns, and even door-knocking – not common practice in
leadership campaigns but we were pulling out all the stops – we had exhausted our traditional methods of reaching out to constituents. We implemented a so- cial media strategy, introducing Twitter, and the much heavier use of other social networking platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. We were halfway through the campaign, shortly af- ter the membership drive cut-off, when Tim’s cam- paign manager told me about a new technology that politicians were commonly using in the United States, called TeleForum (telephone town halls). The basic theory behind TeleForum is simple, have a
large number of people from different cities, provinces, countries, connect at the same time on an interactive phone call. The set-up is similar to a radio call-in show, allowing participants to be engaged without ever leav- ing their homes. Needless to say, as a bit of tech nerd, I was intrigued.
April 2011 | Campaigns & Elections 41
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