Across five post-budget telephone town halls, the Government of Alberta engaged 53,523 Albertans in live, two-way conversation — placing nearly one million calls into homes across the province.
Every provincial budget is a story about priorities — and that story only lands when citizens have a chance to hear it explained, ask their own questions, and feel heard in return. For more than five years, the Government of Alberta has used Converso's managed telephone town hall service to anchor its post-budget engagement strategy: a recurring, province-wide live broadcast that invites Albertans into the conversation the same week the budget is tabled. No download required. No app to learn. Just a phone call from their government, and a real voice on the other end.
How does a provincial government move beyond press releases and small in-person town halls to reach hundreds of thousands of households — in real time, with genuine two-way dialogue — on a single evening? In-person events reach hundreds, not tens of thousands. Press conferences are one-way. Social media is fragmented, easily missed, and rarely surfaces unscreened citizen voices. Alberta needed an engagement channel that could scale to the entire province, accommodate working families on any device, screen and surface representative questions, and produce defensible engagement metrics back to the Minister's office and caucus — all within a single 90-to-100-minute broadcast window following budget day.
Converso delivered an end-to-end managed telephone town hall for each post-budget engagement, integrating outbound dialing, inbound phone access, web streaming audio, and live operator-screened speaker queues into a single broadcast. Each event was anchored by Cabinet ministers and government hosts, supported by Converso production staff handling dialing, screening, host coordination, and live broadcast traffic. Albertans participated however they preferred — by answering an outbound call, dialing in directly, or joining the streaming audio feed on the Government of Alberta website with the ability to submit questions in text.
- Multi-channel citizen access: Albertans joined by outbound call, inbound dial-in, or web streaming audio with text-question submission — a single event accessible across every device and connectivity level in the province.
- End-to-end managed production: Converso handled outbound dialing, inbound queueing, live operator screening, host coordination, and broadcast integration for every event — letting the Minister's office focus on the conversation, not the logistics.
Over five major post-budget events, Converso connected the Government of Alberta with 53,523 Albertans, placing 999,754 dial attempts and delivering 461,626 minutes of real-time citizen engagement. 915 Albertans joined the speaker queue, 631 were screened by live operators, and 53 were brought live on air to put their questions directly to the Minister. An additional 904 streaming audio users participated online, submitting 242 questions through the web channel. The program has now run consistently across multiple budget cycles, establishing telephone town halls as the Government of Alberta's primary post-budget public engagement channel.
- Scale that matches a province. Capacity to place 200,000 dials per event and host thousands of simultaneous listeners on a single broadcast — built for province-wide reach, not boardroom-sized audiences.
- Two-way by design. Citizens don't just listen. They queue, get screened by live operators, and speak directly to the Minister on air — producing the kind of unscripted moments that build public trust.
- Multi-channel access in one event. Outbound phone calls, inbound dial-in, and web streaming audio with text-based questions — all integrated into a single broadcast so no Albertan is locked out by device, location, or accessibility need.
