LOS ALTOS, CALIFORNIA November, 2004 – When Los Altos Hills resident Craig Jones decided he wanted to make a serious difference in public education, infrastructure, and other issues surrounding this affluent Silicon Valley community, he wanted his voice to be heard by running for Los Altos Hills City Council. Jones wanted to personally reach the more than 2,500 registered voters of the picturesque Los Altos Hills community, but he was faced with the problem of how to effectively deliver his messages. Besides exhaustively walking door-to-door through the rolling hills, he used the newly-released Voicent BroadcastByPhone software, developed by Voicent Communications (http://www.voicent.com), as an alternative approach. The product was released just in time for the start of the November 2 political campaign.

BroadcastByPhone is an easy to use, automatic PC-based telephone notification system designed for small businesses and organizations that need to effectively reach large numbers of people but in a highly personalized manner. BroadcastByPhone’s rich features make it an ideal communications tool for group event notifications, political campaign promotions, fundraising, customer surveys, service reminders, product promotions, and other activities.

BroadcastByPhone provides an advanced features set that enables users to record their own voice messages using any telephone. Users no longer need to worry about noisy microphone recording. They can broadcast their voice messages at a set broadcast time with automatic retries if the line is busy or there is no pickup. The software can detect a human voice versus an answering machine, and provides interactive voice commands for human responses. Users can also record incoming RSVP messages so they can gauge their recipients’ responses. BroadcastByPhone’s user-friendly call log viewing gives users complete status details about their calls.

BroadcastByPhone’s powerful message designer feature allows users to compose and edit personalized individual phone messages using a mixture of text-to-speech and voice messages. BroadcastByPhone also allows users to easily import call lists from their existing database, using the Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet interface. In addition, it checks the US Federal Do Not Call List. This feature is included in every version of the product, including the product’s shareware version.

According to winning candidate Craig Jones, Voicent BroadcastByPhone helped him personally reach all of the Los Altos Hills residents. "The [Viocent] automatic dialing program was an effective boost to my City Council campaign. It complimented my direct mail and personal contact in a very cost and time effective manner. We estimate that my calls reached virtually 100% of the homes in our town, and provided a personal touch. It was great knowing that all our residents heard from me personally."

Kathy Evans, campaign manager for Jones, explained how BroadcastByPhone was an effective communications tool during the campaign. Evans said, "It would have taken us hundreds of hours to call every member of our community. BroadcastByPhone was a great product that helped us in many ways. This is the product to use for anyone running for public office, wishing to contact their customers, or even calling for school phone trees!"

An evaluation copy of Voicent BroadcastByPhone can be downloaded from the Voicent Communications web site at http://www.voicent.com/download.

ABOUT VOICENT
Communication matters. Voicent is motivated by the belief that great communication builds great businesses. Our software empowers healthcare professionals, business owners, religious leaders, and activity organizers to better communicate with people while at the same time, save time and money.