Persuasion vs. Information
What the research says about why conversation works — and why everything else doesn't.
People accept decisions that go against them — when they felt heard.
A survey collects input without visibly considering it. A video announces a decision. Only a live forum lets a decision-maker hear an objection and answer it in front of witnesses. The research on what actually moves people is unambiguous.
What 10 studies actually found
High-volume Facebook advertising increased ad recall in some cases but produced no significant increase in candidate name recognition or positive evaluations.
One hour on a telephone town hall with a member of Congress raised personal ratings by 14 points. For skeptics: 300–500%.
Across dozens of randomized campaign-contact experiments, the best estimate of the average persuasive effect in general elections was approximately zero.
Field experiments found that non-judgmental personal conversations produced durable attitude change lasting at least four months. Arguments alone had no effect.
Removing political ads from Facebook and Instagram for six weeks before the 2020 U.S. election produced no detectable effect on political knowledge, polarization, candidate favourability, participation, or turnout.
Phone conversations increased turnout by 4%. What mattered was the quality of the conversation, not simply who made the call. Commercial scripts reading a call list had zero effect.
Exposure to opposing political views on social media did not make people more moderate, and made some significantly more polarized.
A single ~10-minute live conversation changed attitudes for roughly 1 in 10 voters. The effect lasted at least three months and survived exposure to counterarguments.
Recent mobile eye-tracking research found social media content received an average of 3 seconds of actual visual attention. Attention is a critical bottleneck for social-media advertising.
Randomized field experiments found that participating in an online town hall changed policy views, evaluations of representatives, and subsequent electoral behaviour.
Mobile advocacy generated a 2.6% response rate vs. 1.4% for email. Nonprofits sent 40% more mobile messages in 2025. Despite the increased volume, the mobile advocacy response rate fell 16% year-over-year.
Participants said they'd attend a virtual meeting again with an elected representative — against a backdrop where only half of Canadians express high or moderately high trust in the federal government.
What this means
Not a channel problem. A format problem.
Your audience isn't disengaged. They're exhausted by being broadcast at. The moment you give them a live voice, they show up. 97% say they'd do it again.
The research doesn't distinguish between town halls and other conversations — it distinguishes between broadcast and dialogue.
Email, social, SMS, video — all one-way. A telephone town hall is the only format that creates genuine two-way dialogue at scale.
This is why Converso exists.
We don't run telephone town halls because they're convenient. We run them because they're the only format that's been proven — repeatedly, in randomized controlled experiments — to actually move people.
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