Congresswoman Nanette Diaz Barragán recently held a telephone townhall forum for her district, offering a Spanish-language listening option for constituents as they joined the call. California’s 44th Congressional District is 69.4% Hispanic, so offering full forum participation in Spanish allowed Representative Barragán to ensure that her constituents were able to express language preference and get the most out of the live virtual town hall.
Produced by Telephone Town Hall Meeting (TTHM), the purpose of this town hall was to allow Congresswoman Barragán to provide important COVID-19 vaccine rollout information in hard-hit Los Angeles County. Joining Rep. Barragán was L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn and Dr. Seira Kurian, who provided critical updates and helped field constituent questions.
Event participants were able to submit questions for Q&A in English or in Spanish. The Congresswoman took questions from both audiences, with all questions asked and answered in English, while the entire forum was live-translated for Spanish Simulcast participants. Simulcast listeners were able to vote in polls and leave post-event voicemails along with English-language listeners, with a full forum recording of the Spanish translation delivered in reporting.
Rep. Barragán used similar forums in 2020 to deliver important COVID safety and testing information. The Congresswoman’s team has always employed TTHM’s “best practices”, utilizing a custom web registration page for her events to develop an ongoing opt-in list of engaged citizens. Web registrants submit more questions and listen for longer, improving the overall quality of the forum. For this call, Rep. Barragán started with an “opt-in” list of over 1,500 constituents.
Like citizens around the country, participants on the Congresswoman’s teletownhall had a lot of questions on how, when and where to get the vaccine. Nearly 90,000 people joined the forum, utilizing both English and Spanish participation options and submitting more than 150 questions. Constituents who did not get their question answered by the end of the forum were encouraged to leave a voicemail message for Rep. Barragán, and those messages were delivered in TTHM’s extensive reporting package for followup. Some of the topics submitted in this forum were:
- Is there any way to get more vaccines and testing sites in our area?
- When you are vaccinated, can you still carry the virus?
- I’m 75 and I don’t have a vehicle, do you have a facility for walk-ups for the vaccine?
- I’m an educator and trying to get a vaccine through my health care provider, should I look elsewhere since they’re still in phase A?
As the call progressed, TTHM worked to help drive call participants to both Rep. Barragán and Supervisor Hahn’s websites for additional information. TTHM operators interfacing with constituents were also provided with this information by the event moderator to help relay important websites and phone numbers for those in need of assistance.
TTHM has managed forum focused on COVID safety, testing and vaccines for Members of Congress, Labor Unions, Health Care Providers, Cities and Counties around the country. While Rep. Barragán utilized our Spanish simulcast, TTHM can accommodate a variety of languages to reach as much of a constituent community as possible. We combine texting, digital signup pages, online survey functions, email collection, detailed reports, and our simulcast options to deliver coordinated client outreach. TTHM continues to provide convenient, effective, and powerful mass-communication services and tools tailored to fit each client and their communications needs.