AV for Town Halls and All-Hands Events: Making the Message Land

A conference has an agenda. Attendees arrive knowing what they are there to hear, and the production is built around structured delivery. A town hall is different. The audience knows the CEO is speaking, but the dynamics are less predictable: questions from the floor, announcements that land differently than expected, reactions that ripple through a large room.

The technical production for a town hall has to support those dynamics. It needs to feel like communication, not performance. The PA cannot sound like a theatre speaker system. The screens need to show the right thing at the right moment, without a heavy-handed operator making the room feel managed.

Getting consistent sound coverage across a 500 or 1,000-person room is not a simple scaling problem. The room's acoustic properties, ceiling height, and shape determine what system works.

• ✓Delay speakers for deep rooms — In rooms where the back third is far from the main PA, delay speakers positioned mid-room ensure consistent level and intelligibility. Without them, the back of the room hears the sound twice: once from the PA and once bounced from the walls.
• ✓Distributed audio for atrium and lobby spaces — Town halls increasingly spill into overflow areas. A distributed audio system that takes the same mix to ceiling speakers in the lobby needs to be in the brief if this is the format.
• ✓Q&A microphone management — For live Q&A, roving mics require crew to manage distribution. Audience microphone posts at fixed positions work in auditorium-style setups where people approach a designated point. The format of Q&A determines which approach is right.
• ✓Radio frequency management — In central London office buildings particularly, competing radio frequencies from in-building systems can cause drop-outs on radio microphones. Frequency coordination needs to happen before the show day, not during set-up.

In a large room, many people cannot see the stage clearly. Screens that show a live camera feed of the speaker close the distance between the audience and the presenter. Slides alone do not.

• ✓IMAG (image magnification) cameras — Live camera feeds of the speaker on large screens are standard for rooms over 400 people. This requires at least one camera operator, a vision mixing desk, and screen infrastructure to carry the feed throughout the room.
• ✓Screen size and positioning for depth — The standard rule of thumb is that the bottom of a presentation screen should be no more than twice the screen height above the floor, and the furthest viewer should be no more than eight screen widths from the screen face. For deep rooms, this often means side screens in addition to the main stage screen.
• ✓Content beyond slides — Town halls benefit from content that goes beyond bullet points. Pre-recorded video messages, data visualisations, and simple motion graphics hold attention in a way that static slides do not. These need to be in the brief so the playback system is set up to handle them.

Town halls frequently include colleagues joining remotely. The hybrid element is often treated as secondary, with a laptop pointed at the stage. That approach fails the remote audience and reflects badly on the organisation.

• ✓Dedicated upload connection — The streaming encoder needs its own internet connection, separate from the venue WiFi and from any other streaming activity in the building. This is non-negotiable for consistent stream quality.
• ✓Test the stream before the day — A streaming platform, encoder, and network configuration that has not been tested before the event day is not reliable. A technical rehearsal with the actual production system, in the actual venue, the day before is standard.

This is not a technical problem but a production one. A town hall in a warehouse-scale space with an audience of 800 can feel cold and distant if the production design does not address scale. Not every solution is expensive.

• ✓Lighting the audience as well as the stage — A room where only the stage is lit and the audience is in the dark feels like a lecture. Uplighting the room perimeter and maintaining some ambient level in the audience gives a different energy.
• ✓Speaker positioning — A speaker on a high stage 10 metres from the front row is further from the audience than one who can step down to a thrust or catwalk position. Not all venues allow this but where they do, it changes the feel significantly.
• ✓Live reactions on screen — Briefly cutting to audience reaction shots on the IMAG during applause or a significant announcement makes the audience part of what is being shown. It changes the dynamic from performance to participation.