The establishment of hotlines and information centres provides the necessary capacity to respond to the public and enhances any general educational programme.
The majority of education interventions are based on an outreach principle: taking information and education to people where they are by using active strategies such as advertizing, face to face interaction, campaigning and mass mailings.
But, particularly at election times and during important social moments, members of the public want and seek out information. This sea change can overwhelm an organization or an electoral authority because it is not prepared for individual calls or contacts with members of the public.
Yet such contact has significant advantages. It demonstrates some form of civic participation that, however selfish in motive or limited in design, has to be affirmed. The individual seeking information has a specific educational need that can be met quickly and with uncommon focus. Those seeking information also give information about their impressions and attitudes, about the actual conduct of the election, or the condition of the society, and about the performance of the educational programme or campaign. Finally, the satisfied individual is likely to convey both the satisfaction and the information to others, becoming a powerful ally of the educational programme.
It is not enough to wait for the public, though. When a decision is made to establish such a centre, it must be advertized and should complement the general programme, through providing information to it, and using information from it, by advertizing the general programme's services and being advertized by it.
Types of Information Centres and Hotlines
An information centre can be established as a walk-in facility, or it can be linked directly to a telephone line and be invisible to the public. A hotline can be centralized and operate on a continuous basis, or it can be decentralized and operate only at particular times in a campaign.
Whichever model is developed, it should be a one-stop shop, where the people who interact with the public have information at their disposal to answer any question without referring people to another department or information source. Members of the public do not have the time nor the knowledge to go from pillar to post looking for information. They expect it from their first contact. Anyone opening an information centre should understand that they will be faced with, and therefore have to have systems for dealing with, a range of questions.
With the rise of a consumer society in urbanized and industrialized countries, many companies have established such hotlines to deal with their customers. The technology and techniques of a public information line are similar to these.
The difference is in the level of service demanded, the neutrality that must be engendered, and the diversity of service required by statute or by organizational intention. It may be essential to deal with people in their home language, to be able to refer them directly to legal or administrative assistance, and to have access to a broad range of information to answer their questions. Perhaps the closest general parallel is the computer software support offered by vendors.
The Importance of the Telephone
Information centres are made possible by computers and telephones. In particular, they require access to telephone banks, central exchanges, and, where possible, toll-free facilities enabling callers to place their call anywhere in the country and get a well-trained, and well-resourced, operator.
Because these centres have to gather information, it is easier to do this in a centralized fashion, and regional centres often require heavily networked computer systems.
This means, however, that members of the public have to have access to a telephone. In some societies, this is taken for granted, either because there is universal personal access to an instrument or because there is a good and cheap public service.
In other countries this is not necessarily the case.
Those setting up an information centre have to consider alternative ways of making contact with the public. Amongst the strategies that have been tried are the following:
- establishing branches and community information desks. A national centre can establish regional walk-in centres or field-based desks that have trained staff who can replicate the national service, or operators who can use radio, cellular phones, or land lines to contact the trained staff on behalf of the individual.
- setting up temporary communications systems. In some circumstances, it is possible to set up temporary telephone systems. Solar-powered telephone systems are available, and community-based cellular systems can be arranged. In some cases, an electoral authority might have to prepare a telephone or radio link for a future voting site and this same site could be used as a dial-in point for a national information centre.
- including postal service responses. In addition to call-in systems, it is possible, when the mail is reliable, to have a postal response system.
All these systems are complementary to the central information hub, and its establishment is key to the success of such a venture.
There are a few experiences of such a system operating in support of elections and democratic participation, and the lessons from these are available.
At the heart, they boil down to the following:
- the importance of setting up systems for collecting, storing, and retrieving information
- good one-to-one communication with the public
- extensive advertizing to make sure that the system is used
- a robust telephone system capable of growing to meet almost unlimited demand and then shrinking down when this demand falls off
- a positive working relationship between the centre organizers and the statutory authority
When systems are set up, they are extremely popular. In South Africa, the information centre at the 1995 local elections took three thousand calls an hour during the voting period. In Australia, more telephone calls were made to the electoral commission's service in the last days of registration than to all government departments and the national airline.
This popularity, with sensational spikes in demand when the numbers are advertized on television, shows the importance of setting up such a line and also the importance of getting the planning and the technology right.
Spinoffs
One of the major spinoffs of such a centre is its ability to act as an early warning system of security and administrative crises. It can act as a cushion between electoral authorities and the public when complaints are being raised.
Many citizens have complaints on election day, but with electoral authorities stretched, an information line not only hands out good information, which reduces frustration, but reduces tension and possible post-election grievance.
Mobile phones
Mobile telephones, or cellular phones, have been adopted with alacrity in most countries. In developing countries they have been particularly successful in leapfrogging the paucity of existing cable based infrastructure and the informal habitations which inhibit telephony requiring cables, billing addresses, and fixed base services.
As mobile telephony technology develops, commercial operators and individual consumers have exploited the technology in surprising ways. It is therefore almost impossible to predict what may happen next. However education planners can take for granted that national mobile networks will incorporate through individual subscribers and community services (such as those in Bangladesh) an increasing number of their urban population, and possibly a significant proportion of the commercially active rural population.
Key features capable of exploitation at the moment include the short messaging service (SMS), value added telephone numbers, and caller identification and caller location, ring tones and logos. Technology which is coming on line at the time of writing which may introduce new innovations includes cameras and multi media services (MMS), video-phone and GPRS data services, and e-mail.
An increasing number of mobile handsets will allow radio reception, and the features of MP3 or similar music players (see radio and convergence) are being incorporated in some instruments.
Amongst the experiments presently being undertaken are:
- Access to various broadcast or pre-recorded services
- Cell based access to services such as voter registration and roll checking
- Mass distribution of public education messages
- Election observation and related monitoring
- Polling and voting
- Political party campaigning
