Canada's fully managed telephone town hall service
Canada's fully managed telephone town hall service
When Fort McMurray burned in 2016 and flooded in 2020, the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo used Converso telephone town halls to reach over 190,000 residents across both crises — providing real-time information, live Q&A with officials, and a two-way channel when traditional communication infrastructure was strained or unavailable.
Fort McMurray is a remote northern city of roughly 70,000 permanent residents — with a geography that makes mass in-person assembly impossible during emergencies and a population that includes a significant transient workforce with no established local ties. In both 2016 and 2020, the RMWB needed to reach a dispersed, stressed population with accurate information and credible officials. They chose the telephone.
On May 1, 2016, the Horse River Wildfire forced the largest evacuation in Alberta history. Nearly 90,000 residents were ordered to leave Fort McMurray within hours. The wildfire ultimately burned over 590,000 hectares and destroyed more than 2,400 structures.
With residents displaced across Alberta and beyond, the RMWB needed a communication channel that could reach people regardless of where they had gone — in shelters, at family homes, in hotels. Phone was the only channel with universal reach. Converso was engaged from the first days of the emergency.
Converso ran 17 live telephone town hall events over 30 days during active emergency. Each event connected displaced residents directly with senior government officials — including the Premier of Alberta, the Deputy Premier, the Minister of Municipal Affairs, the Public Affairs Bureau, and essential utility providers — for live, two-way briefings.
Across those 17 events, 161,233 residents were reached. Participants could ask questions live on air, listen to authoritative updates on evacuation zones, and receive direct answers from officials — without leaving wherever they were sheltering.
In April 2020, Fort McMurray was hit by a 1-in-100-year flood event — an ice jam on the Athabasca River that inundated parts of the community and forced thousands of additional evacuations. The flood struck during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when in-person public gatherings were prohibited and residents were already dealing with pandemic-related stress, employment disruption, and uncertainty.
Physical public meetings were impossible. Online-only engagement would have excluded residents without reliable internet — including many of those most severely affected by the flood. The RMWB called Converso again.
Converso ran 5 telephone town hall events in April 2020. Each 90-minute event connected flood-affected residents with a multi-agency panel of 10 to 15 representatives — providing live updates on evacuation orders, insurance claims, emergency services, and recovery timelines, and answering resident questions directly and on the record.
Across the 5 events, 29,445 participants took part — an average of 5,890 per event, with an average participation duration of 30 minutes. Residents submitted 983 questions; 58 were answered live on air.
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