Medical and Legal Practitioners and Staff Welcome!

We hope you’ll join us at Voteworks in working to educate, motivate, mobilize and support non-partisan efforts getting out the vote this year.

If you’re working in a medical or legal practice or clinic, we’ve designed this page to show you some specific ideas of how you can support the effort.

Before you jump in (and start jumping around!), bear in mind that you might need to adapt some of the terminology on the site to better your match your environment. For instance, when you see terms like "business" or "customer," the information will be more pertinent to you if you substitute your equivalent terms, such as "practice," "patient," or "client." For "store," you might substitute "clinic" or "office." If you use the vocabulary of your workplace, we think you’ll better envision how the campaigns and ideas will work for you.

Also, if you want to reference the guidelines that address what’s Legal and Appropriate regarding these types of activities in the workplace, click the link above and you’ll see what is and isn’t allowed.

Now let’s get started!

The nature of a patient visit to a doctor’s office or hospital, or the nature of a client visit to a legal office, provides several unique opportunities to support the election-related issues in which Voteworks is committed. The same can be said of the networks in which medical and legal professionals typically participate.

The first set of ideas below maximizes the use of your physical location. Unlike product-based businesses, your place of business, whether it’s called an office, clinic, or hospital, is akin to a "store" of sorts: People come in and out; they ask questions of staff; they wait at certain times, etc. Now think about how you can...

Activate patients, clients and staff with:

• Customized posters or displays supporting activities such as voter registration, volunteering, and voter information. Find some examples in the Customer Campaign Tool Kit
• A vote graphic or November 2 poster in lobbies, waiting rooms, exam rooms, or other places where people congregate
• Voter registration forms in clear, easy-to-identify holders in key locations
• Voter registration tabling (until voter registration deadlines in each state).
• Reminders to staff to ask the simple question "Are you registered to vote?"
• Election-day signs in your office saying "Did you vote today?"
• Election-day reminders to staff to ask "Did you vote today?"

To multiply the effect of these activities, think about how you could duplicate efforts in similar "stores," using networks of legal and medical associations and affiliated organizations:

• For medical professionals, contact or send letters to physicians associated with area or regional hospitals or other medical networks, asking if they would be willing to do some of the activities listed in the set of bullets above.
• For legal professionals, especially in non-Federally funded Legal Aid clinics, help us to spread the word about this project.
• Take posters and info about Voteworks to professional meetings and give them to attendees
• Encourage professional organizations with web sites to include a brief description of Voteworks, and a link to this page of the site (contact us for information on this)

If you or your staff is interested in volunteering, you might consider linking them to a terrific website for non-partisan volunteering, to help get out the vote, at www.electionmatch.org.

Medical professionals can see an example of what some physicians in Colorado are doing with a Voter Registration Project they’ve initiated.