A town hall meeting is a place for meaningful discourse and conversation. They can be incredibly empowering spaces for local residents (or employees, in the case of businesses) to provide feedback on critical issues, voice their opinions, and discuss emerging issues. On the flip side, communication breakdowns and divisive debates can flourish in town halls that devote too little time to forming consensus.
The robust electronic voting capabilities of audience response systems (ARS) allow town hall participants to engage in live, interactive voting using a smartphone device, laptop, tablet or a keypad clicker. With these affordable e-voting systems, local government and business administrators can deliver town hall meetings that satisfy the demands of residents, employees, and other stakeholders for greater inclusion, engagement and collaborative decision making.
Question & Answer
With only a few clicks, town hall attendees can submit questions in real time to be addressed by their town hall leaders. This is particularly useful for town halls that draw big crowds. Once a question is submitted, it immediately posts to a live display-board for all to see and vote on. Town hall leaders can select which questions to answer first without any bias, and choose questions that got the highest number of votes.
Detecting and answering the top concerns of the community is a simple process with ARS. More importantly, everyone leaves feeling the concerns and needs of their community were considered and adequately addressed.
Polling
Live audience response can do more than facilitate dialogue. With live polls, town hall leaders can also show their stakeholders that they’re valuable members of the decision-making process.Polls can be set up in advance of town halls. Town hall leaders also have the ability to display incoming votes on-screen for added transparency.
Voting
Town hall leaders often dread holding ballots during town hall meetings because they lack the right tools. When left to a show of hands, votes can result in objections, vote re-counting and divisive conflict. These delays, inefficiencies and inaccuracies can be avoided with a simple e-voting system.
With ARS, votes are collected, counted and managed in an automated fashion. Town hall leaders are no longer bogged down by vote counting or re-counting. The majority of the agenda can instead be devoted to question and answer, healthy debate, and consensus building. For sensitive ballots, voter submissions can be concealed allowing attendees to vote without fear of scrutiny or bias. With a mobile audience response solution, virtual attendees can even participate in ballots at the same time as on-site attendees.
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With a blend of live questioning, polling, and voting, valuable feedback is gathered when the attention of town hall constituents is at its highest. Electronic voting systems thus serve as a powerful facilitator of civic and employee engagement. With live audience response technologies, town hall leaders satisfy demands for quick, responsive action. What’s more, audience voting data is stored in automatically generated reports, which can be used for live feedback monitoring and continued analysis.
Town hall meetings with tens to hundreds to thousands of local residents, employees, and other stakeholders are repairing the feedback loop and unlocking their potential with affordable e-voting systems.
