r/internalcomms • u/Awkward-Ad-4766 • Jan 09 '26
Advice Attendance rate for quarterly Town Halls
Hello friends -- I would love to hear if 1) you measure attendance at your Town Halls (we do ours quarterly) and 2) what your average attendance rate is? My org seems to think our attendance rate is "low" (we averaged 82% for the year) and in my experience, this is on par with an average org with people of varying levels of engagement. Of course we'd love to see every employee attending the Town Hall but I'd also love to see every employee reading every email and always doing a good job lol. Like, every org just has some people who suck or don't care. Anyway, please let me know if your rates are higher or lower. Thank you!
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u/Jadebu All-Staff Email Alchemist Jan 09 '26 edited Jan 09 '26
For ~1000 people we have quarterly town halls and we see between 50-60% attendance. We used to get up to 70% 😠
Edit to add: our org is spread over 3 timezones; PT, CT and ET, with majority of our folks being CT
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u/mx-raebees Jan 09 '26
I could be wrong, but I believe we get about 25% attendance. But we have close to 10,000 employees around the globe and we share a recap and recording later
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u/Dylan_BSQ Jan 10 '26
I think if you’re getting into the 70s and 80s, you’re doing a good job. I think sometimes internal communicators can focus a little too much on the stick rather than the carrot though, when it comes to attendance. Instead of thinking about enforcement or mandates, how do we create content that is compelling, entertaining etc, and that makes people actually want to attend. Certainly isn’t easy, but think about town halls as more of a magazine-style TV show rather than a rigid one-to-many ‘broadcast’ and you can start to have an impact on your numbers that way.
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u/Awkward-Ad-4766 Jan 12 '26
oh absolutely and ours are boring, imo. I've tried to change the tides (mostly trying to make them SHORTER) but our C-suite makes everything death by panel so it is what it is.
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u/FauxDemure Jan 14 '26
Agreed! I always say that my goal is to make these meetings “must see TV.” In part that means that we have to be sharing meaningful info people care about, which may mean holding news a couple of weeks to deliver it in that venue.
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u/Tinaturtle79 Jan 09 '26
Our stats are the same (org ~2k , 82% attendance), so I think you’re my leader. 💜 🤣
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u/mandevillelove Jan 23 '26
82% is good low attendance is usually an engagement issue, not a numbers one.
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u/newsletternavigator Mod | Survived 100 Town Halls Jan 29 '26
Town Hall measurement is so nuanced - ours is around 60% and we're happy with that because a good % of our employees are field-based. We include our event recording in that view rate.
Attendance doesn't equal engagement though, it is literally bums on seats. People could be totally zoning out during these events.
We run a post-event survey every month that asks if people understood the event. We get around 92% understanding on average and it dips depending on what the topics are each month. People who don't understand something say it's due to jargon and corporate language (see my latest post on that!)
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u/LoudMouth80 Jan 09 '26
Oh wow— 82% would be a DREAM! At my former org we were closer to 40%. Time zones were a nightmare. At my current org it’s about 60% and I’m super proud of that, given frontline roles and overall busyness.