The intense public interest and rapidly changing landscape of COVID-19 issues are forcing many communities to work hard to educate the public and correct misinformation.
But every alert, press release or other news has the potential to generate calls from the public – asking for clarification, more detail, etc. And that means at least two problems for many communities:
- Limited phone capacity. Most counties and cities do not have the telephone line capacity to handle so many inbound calls being generated. (Some states are reporting hundreds of thousands of calls per day.)
- Limited staff. Hand-in-hand with the lack of telephone lines is the lack of people to answer the phone.
Fortunately, there’s an easy answer that can handle large volumes of calls cost-effectively: it’s a pre-recorded community hotline, such as the Hyper-Reach Hotline™.
The Hyper-Reach Hotline is available 24 hours/day, 7 days a week to provide residents with current information about important community issues, such as those involving COVID-19. Agencies can record and update messages that residents can access wherever they want, as well as providing easy access to additional resources as needed (for example, forwarding the caller to public health or other agencies.
As one public health official told ABC News, “Hotlines create greater ‘equity of information,’ Not everybody has access to the internet. Whether they’re low income or seniors or rural populations that may not have internet they do have access to the phone.”
Messages on the Hyper-Reach Hotline can be updated from any telephone, enabling agencies to keep the information fresh and respond to new questions.
