Since 2018, Converso has delivered every telephone town hall for the Government of Alberta's provincial budget consultations — 16 events across eight budget cycles, reaching 256,559 Albertans directly on their phones and generating more than 1.8 million minutes of live, two-way engagement on provincial fiscal policy.
Alberta is a province of striking geographic and demographic range — major cities, oil and gas communities, agricultural regions, and remote northern settlements separated by hundreds of kilometres. No in-person consultation can fairly canvass that breadth on a weeknight, and digital-only channels exclude Albertans without reliable broadband. Since the 2018 budget cycle, the Treasury Board and Finance ministry has used telephone town halls as a permanent consultation channel — running both pre-budget regional consultations and post-tabling province-wide events. Converso has delivered every one of them.
The Government of Alberta needed a consultation method that could meet four conditions simultaneously: reach hundreds of thousands of constituents in a single 90-minute window regardless of internet access; collect substantive, structured input — not just open web comments — on technical budget questions; sustain a high enough operational standard to involve the Premier, Finance Minister, and senior officials live on air; and repeat reliably year after year as governments, ministers, and communications priorities changed. In-person town halls reach only the engaged minority. Online surveys cannot deliver dialogue. Mass-media campaigns talk at the public rather than with them. The province needed two-way conversation at provincial scale.
Converso operates as the Government of Alberta's end-to-end telephone town hall partner. Each event dials hundreds of thousands of Alberta households simultaneously — recent province-wide events have placed close to 400,000 outbound calls in a single broadcast — while opening a parallel streaming-audio channel for online attendees and inbound lines for constituents who want to call in. Converso's screeners manage the question queue in real time; Converso's hosts run the on-air production alongside the Minister's office; live polling captures structured public sentiment within the event; and voicemail capture preserves the questions there isn't time to take live. The platform has run continuously for eight budget cycles — pre-budget consultations split between Northern, Southern, and Central Alberta, and province-wide budget release events — without an outage or a missed cycle.
- End-to-end production, from outbound dialing and inbound capture through professional screening, hosting, live polling, streaming audio, and voicemail — managed by Converso's team alongside provincial communications and the Minister's office.
- Repeatable, multi-region delivery — separate North, South, and Central pre-budget consultations alongside province-wide budget release events within a single cycle, with consistent reporting, polling, and engagement metrics across every regional variant.
Over 16 telephone town halls and eight budget cycles, the Government of Alberta has engaged 256,559 Albertans directly by phone, accumulating 1,822,206 minutes of live listening time — the equivalent of more than 30,000 hours of constituent attention on provincial fiscal policy. Constituents submitted more than 3,000 questions to the queue, of which 2,318 were reviewed by Converso screeners and 262 were brought live on air to speak directly with the Premier or Finance Minister. Online attendees submitted an additional 1,290 questions through the streaming-audio channel. Live polling captured up to 855 structured votes in a single event. The most recent event — the Budget 2026 release on December 9, 2025 — was the largest in the series, with 21,519 attendees. Across three provincial governments, six finance ministers, and a global pandemic, the partnership has not missed a budget cycle.
- Scale without sacrifice. Converso has dialed close to 400,000 Alberta phone numbers in a single event while sustaining professional screening, live polling, on-air call quality, and a parallel online stream — the operational standard required to put a Premier and Finance Minister directly on the line with the province.
- A platform built for public engagement, not webinars. Telephone reaches Albertans where digital channels cannot: rural and remote households, seniors, constituents without broadband, and the politically disengaged who would never attend an in-person hall. Converso's hybrid telephone + streaming-audio architecture meets every Albertan on the channel they actually use, in a format that requires no app, no login, and no learning curve.
