Over eight months in 2023, the Progressive Conservative Party of Manitoba opened 40 live phone lines to nearly 400,000 households — putting candidates and voters in direct conversation across the province's most competitive ridings.
Heading into the 2023 provincial election, the PC Party faced a structural challenge: a strong rural base, but eroding urban support and a closing window to re-engage soft supporters and undecided voters on healthcare, affordability, and public safety. Traditional canvassing and earned media alone could not deliver the scale or the two-way dialogue the moment required. The party turned to Converso to design and execute a province-wide Virtual Town Hall program built around direct voter access, live Q&A, and repeated engagement in the ridings that would decide the election.
The PC Party needed to reach hundreds of thousands of voters across 34 strategically selected ridings — many of them swing seats — in a compressed pre-election window. Door-knocking alone could not scale. Broadcast advertising could not create dialogue. The campaign needed a channel that could deliver three things simultaneously: scale (thousands of households per event), intimacy (candidates speaking directly to constituents in real time), and intelligence (live polling and question data to inform messaging on the ground). It also needed to function in both dense Winnipeg neighbourhoods and remote rural constituencies — on a single, reliable platform.
Converso deployed a phased, 40-event Virtual Town Hall program on its interactive voice and data platform, structured across three strategic rounds between February and October 2023. Each 60-minute event dialed approximately 10,000 households in a single riding, preceded by an automated reminder call 24 hours prior to maximize attendance. Voters joined live to hear directly from PC candidates, ask questions in real time, and respond to instant polls — generating both engagement and a continuous stream of constituency-level intelligence. The phased rollout allowed the campaign to start in suburban Winnipeg, expand into mixed urban-rural swing seats mid-summer, and concentrate firepower on the most competitive ridings in the final pre-election push.
- A 40-event, three-phase Virtual Town Hall program targeting 34 strategic ridings between February and October 2023.
- A unified voice and data platform capable of reaching ~10,000 households per event reliably across both dense Winnipeg ridings and remote rural constituencies.
The PC Party retained 22 seats provincially, and 13 of those 22 winning ridings — 59% of the PC caucus — were directly engaged by the Converso VTH program. Retention was strongest in rural and outer-suburban ridings, with constituencies like La Vérendrye and Midland, both engaged across multiple rounds, staying firmly in the PC column. Repeated engagement correlated visibly with retention: ridings reached in more than one round were more likely to hold than those touched once. Live question volume and poll participation were consistently high, validating the format as a channel voters actually wanted to use. While VTHs alone could not offset broader urban dissatisfaction, the program delivered measurable retention value, real-time constituency intelligence, and a repeatable engagement infrastructure the party can build on in future cycles.
- Real-time voter intelligence built in. Live Q&A and instant polling turn every event into a constituency-level data feed, giving campaign teams immediate, actionable signal on what voters actually care about — riding by riding.
- Proven across Canada's most demanding engagement environments. From provincial election campaigns to government consultations and First Nations assemblies, Converso operates the infrastructure trusted by organizations where reliability, reach, and respectful dialogue are non-negotiable.
