Tarion’s webcast-only Annual Public Meeting improves transparency

Tarion Warranty Corporation, which administers the Ontario New Home Warranties Plan Act (providing every owner of a new home with a home warranty), made its 2016 Annual Public Meeting a webcast-only event in order to give more access to its stakeholders. Tarion’s commitment to transparency has earned it first place in the “Organizational Transparency” category of PR Daily’s 2017 Corporate Social Responsibility awards.

Seeking to build on the success of the previous year’s webcast,  the organization sought to attract even more participants for its 2017 meeting, reaching more parts of Ontario and delivering even greater transparency, mostly by answering as many live questions as possible.

Tarion engaged local media to raise awareness of the meeting and used its industry e-newsletter to invite participation by a range of stakeholders, including builders, home inspectors, realtors and real estate lawyers. 

The cornerstone effort to answer participant questions started with eliminating presentations from the meeting and replacing them with a short overview video. The organization also organized a triage approach to questions that came in live so specific homeowner issues could be redirected to customer service representatives (who were there to address questions), ensuring that those reaching the moderator were appropriate to be answered by a panel. 

More than 1,800 people registered for the meeting, a boost of 200 from the previous year, including many homeowners who were out of town when the event took place. More than 200 people have watched the YouTube video of the two-hour meeting, during which the panel answered 28 questions. A post-meeting survey found participants rated the meeting high. 

Congratulations for the great work performed by Michael Quast, Laurie Stephens, Andreea Aslan, Tammy Frade, Daniel Caprara and Christopher Cooper.