Hello, everybody. My name is Ross Thompson, and it's a pleasure to be speaking with all of you today about building a team to make political action happen for zero dollars. So I'm Timothy Ross Thompson. I'm an LMS 2. I'm your speaker today, and I have no relevant financial relationships to disclose. And who am I? Again, I'm a second year osteopathic medical student. I'm at the Alabama College of Osteopathic Medicine, and I serve as the region 2 trustee elect with the National Student Osteopathic Medical Association. I want to mention that for both these organizations, anything that I speak about today does not reflect the opinions. There are no endorsements, anything like that. This is all my personal opinion and ideas that have developed. But just to give background on why I'm talking about this and building a team. So I have a Bachelor of Arts in political science from the University of Tulsa. I graduated in May of 2020. After that, my first job was serving as a community organizer with the student purge or the public interest research groups. During that time, I worked with the Florida team, which was newly created in the state of Florida to build purge chapters on various college campuses. I was at the University of Florida. And during that time, we recruited over 100 volunteers, 33 interns and registered 900 students to vote. Our primary goal was voter registration. And so we really had a great time. And I'm really proud of our efforts there on that campus. And I learned a lot that I'm going to be talking about today based on my experiences with purge. But I also want to mention that I was an assistant orientation director at the University of Tulsa, where I trained over 30 of our orientation leaders, which I had served as in the two years prior. And then I was an account manager and a technical sales engineer with an auction software as a service company, where I oversaw the marketing and emailing for 30 plus clients. So all of those are kind of relevant to this idea of organizing, marketing, social media, training individuals, they all kind of play into the experiences here. But of course, my my time with purge was most relevant to what we're going to be talking about. So the learning objectives for this are looking at how to determine an advocacy issue, your audience and setting a goal. Next, it's building a foundation for the issue that you're taking on a succinct message, and then organizing a team to take on that advocacy issue. And then within that conversation of organizing the team is we're going to be looking at free web based tools to help maximize your advocacy efforts, as well as determining how to incorporate phone banking, social media, community partnerships, days and weeks of action, and competent competition into your advocacy to make it as effective as possible. So really, building the idea building the team, what you can use to do that, and what you're going to do with your team once you've got them. So I want to just kind of give a disclaimer as well about artificial intelligence, because obviously, that's become very frequently used these days. So as a disclaimer, AI was not involved in developing the outline or the content of this PowerPoint in terms of the topics that I'm here to discuss. I also did not use AI as a community organizer, or in my account management or sales engineer role in any way. But I will explain all points in this presentation where AI was involved, because I think that AI is a very relevant tool, especially when we talk about saving as much money as possible, making things as efficient as possible. It can really help with the generation of ideas. So I would have loved the opportunity to have been able to use it in my previous role. And I found some ways that it can be very relevant. And I know that me personally, I'm still learning how to use it. I've been very uncomfortable with it up until the last two or three months where I've started to explore it myself. And so I think I can offer some pointers to people who are maybe like me who are reticent to try it out initially. But I think it can be really helpful, especially in this environment. So I'll be very specific about where it was used. So you can understand and hopefully give some pointers about me as a beginner on it, how it might be useful. And then the PowerPoint has its own AI tool now. And I just thought I should mention that I used its AI designer recommendations, which just help with visuals for the slides. So it takes bullet points and turns them into these nice little blue bubbles like this. So most of the format of this conversation is really going to be me recounting the story of my time with the Public Interest Research Group as it relates to each of those objectives, talking about the takeaways and lessons from what we did, and then how we can apply those lessons to a specific AOA advocacy issue that I took directly from the website that I am a relative beginner and novice in, but that I can see how we could use these various tools and experiences to make something happen. So to start out, you got to define what your problem is. So with student pervs, we were looking at the percent of young people voting is considerably less than the average American. So 42% of young people voted in the 2024 election, compared to on average, 64% of voting adults voted in that election. And, you know, it changes election by election, but it's relatively low. It's always lower than the average. So we knew that that was a problem that we wanted to address. We also know that young people have unique issues that impact them. You know, from a nonpartisan standpoint, there are just things that young people are more passionate about that other populations don't care as much about. But local, state, federal representatives less likely to consider their needs because they need to be elected to get into their positions. And they're not going to consider the thoughts of somebody that's not going to show up to vote as highly as someone who is in most cases. So the kind of the lessons that we learned from approaching that problem is, do you have data to back up the problem? It's a good idea to make sure that it is a problem and that it's something that average people believe it's a problem. So having information at the start is always going to be valuable to be able to get people on board with your issue. So the issue that I've taken from the AOA website goes kind of by the name of truth in advertising, but involves a few different things. Essentially, the idea is that in a number of states where nurse practitioners, physician's assistants, and other healthcare workers are seeing patients, in many cases, patients may be confused or not understanding that the person that they're seeing is not a physician, but is someone with different education and licensure. And so what my understanding of the state advocacy effort is, is ultimately looking at legislation that pushes for healthcare providers to communicate their degree and licensure type to patients so that we can make sure that patients fully understand who is taking care of them and what expertise they have to take on that issue. So ultimately, it's not a conversation of this person doesn't belong here or is wrong or anything of that sort. We love everybody that's involved in our healthcare teams, but we want patients to know if they're being cared for by a DO or an MD, and how that is different from the experience with a PA, an NP, or some other provider who may have a PhD or some kind of other doctoral degree and considers themselves a doctor, but is not a clinical doctor. And so a little bit of the research that I found specifically as it relates to nurse practitioners is that in many cases, nurse practitioners, when they are the sole provider in a situation, are more likely to prescribe more drugs, patients will be more subjective to diagnostic imaging, and the quality of patient referrals can be lower. And so just kind of looking at that as an issue, we want to communicate that to patients so they're aware, so that we can prioritize having DOs and MDs be at the top of the healthcare team, making sure that oversight is happening there. And ultimately, that patients are choosing who is taking care of them. So then you got to define your audience. So in this case, with PERG, our audience was very clear, it's college students. Those are the young people that are easiest for us to access, that are probably politically interested. They have issues that they care about, but they're not very experienced with the voting process and with engaging. And so we want to target them, get them involved in engagement. Another aspect of our audience for this conversation is college administrators and faculty, because they care about these people. And for the most part, they want them to be politically engaged and involved as well. So we can reach out to them as an audience to take on this issue, because we think that they'll be willing to help us and partner with us and care about it. So the lessons we learned from that, you know, the ideal target is going to be impacted by the advocacy issue. If you can work with the person who is dealing with the problem, they're more likely to be the most interested in solving that problem. Or next, if you can find people that care for those individuals who are impacted, if those individuals can't speak for themselves, or if you need a larger group to work with. So for the issue of truth in advertising, I would say that our audience is everyone. Every person is going to be a patient at some point in time. And I think it's important that those patients have the opportunity to know who is caring for them, and whether or not they are a clinical doctor or a physician or not. So next, you're going to assess the audience. So in this case, we want to know what's going to happen when we work with these individuals. What change are we looking to make happen? Are they open to that change? So some of the research that we have says that, you know, if you register to vote, you're more likely to vote. Because if you're not registered to vote, you can't vote. And if you make a plan to vote, you are more likely to vote. So if you have a conversation with someone who cares about you and tells you they want you to vote, and you sit down and actually say, I'm going to go to this location, you know, researching the location in advance, make a plan or work through the process of getting a mail-in ballot, something like that, you're more likely to show up and vote. So the lessons we learned from that, if you follow through on your effort, is it going to have an impact? Does your work matter? And if they've already taken one action, can you get them to take another action? So in the case of voter registration, if we have people that we call on the phone, and they say, I'm already registered, we don't want to just say, thanks, bye. We want to see if we can get them involved in the next step, making sure they vote, which is making that plan. So in the case of truth in advertising, how can we assess this? Well, I did the assessment myself for us, and we are fighting a battle that we can win. In Georgia, in particular, we'll talk about Path to Healthcare Practitioners' Truth and Transparency Act, which requires that in advertisements, healthcare providers explain what their education level is. So, you know, are they a DO, an MD, are they an NP, PA, something else, as well as that they have to affirmatively communicate in their visits with patients about their role, their education level, and just really make sure that patients are able to make the best choices for their healthcare. So we know that this can work. Then the other question is, is your community interested in this issue? So for me, talking to you all as physicians, I want to say, can you ask your patients about this, if this is something that they're passionate about, or any other advocacy issue that you want to take on? Because again, these principles ultimately should be able to be applied to almost any issue that you want to advocate on. So my recommendation, and we're going to look into this, is using surveys, QR codes, and gathering stories from your patients or from your community to see if this is something that is worth pursuing, and whether you're going to be able to gain traction that you need to be successful. So this may be a self-explanatory one, but forms.google.com. This is Google Forms. If you have a Gmail account, this is a free resource you can use. Essentially, you click that blank form button that I've got the blue arrow on, and you're able to write in a description, a title for a form that people are going to fill out. You can ask multiple choice questions, short answer questions, in this case, for the truth in advertising issue. We want to garner some patients, some information from our imaginary patients at my future clinic, maybe that I own. And so we're asking, do you understand the differences between physician and a nurse practitioner? Have you been seen by a healthcare provider when their education and experience was unclear to you? Do you think they should mention their title when they introduce themselves to you? Do you have personal experiences where this has been unclear? So we're both gathering yes, no answers, but also looking for stories from these individuals. And then at the end, asking if they'd want to be involved and help us. Maybe you could do this when you give them their intake form. Maybe you work at a hospital and there's not an easy way for you to do this. Then maybe you create a survey and you put posters around your town or near the hospital somewhere that you can with a QR code or with a link to fill out the survey. Ultimately, just trying to gather information from people to see if this is something that you should continue pursuing. So I mentioned QR codes. Again, here's another free website. This is something that I use frequently as a community organizer, something that I still use now for club events, organization events at ACOM. All you do is you take your link. So on the previous slide, we grabbed a link from the Google form website, and then we plug that in here. It creates a QR code. You put your mouse right over it, save it as an image, and now you can print that off and post it anywhere you want. And people can take that, scan that image with their phone, and it'll take them to the survey, and you can gather information. So next, we want to set a goal. So in this case, as I mentioned, we got 900 voter registrations. Our goal was a thousand. We got 33 interns out of our goal of 30, and just about 100 volunteers out of our initial goal. And then we also had a goal of 10,000 get out the vote calls and texts, and we ended up with 12,000. So we ended up a little low on the voter registrations, unfortunately. That was kind of an issue all around the country in 2020 for student PIRGs, but we were very close. We were excited about that, but I will say that it was really difficult at the beginning when we started in August. The numbers were really low until National Voter Registration Day, which we'll get into later when we talk about days of action. So just, you know, when you're setting goals, it's important. You need to know what you're trying to achieve and what's relevant to that. You want to know some of the steps in that process so that you can be hitting goals as time goes on and motivating people. Remember, you can always recalibrate. I say, you know, set a lower goal at the start for something like this when it's your first time so that you can hit those goals, get people excited that are on your team, and re-up the goals as things go on. So you can move things around as you need, but I think starting lower and building momentum and excitement has a lot of value. And then you also want those goals so that you can track wins. Again, building up that momentum, getting people excited about what they're involved in. So for this truth in advertising situation that we're looking at, setting a goal for us, again, we're asking that question, what needs to be accomplished in our community? What is realistic with our resources? And what milestones do we think are going to be worth celebrating? And so I've done that here. So in this imaginary scenario, I want to build a team of four interns, 40 volunteers, and our ultimate goal is to get 2,000 emails sent by constituents to representatives in our districts that represent us at State Congress. And so I have the four interns in mind, one being a campaign coordinator, so that's someone who really oversees the whole project for me, because right in this scenario, I'm a busy physician. I can't run all of this. I'm putting together the team, and I may be training this one person to lead the efforts. Then I've got somebody whose focus is getting volunteers for each of our events, so working with community partners and people to get involved, an event planner, so somebody who handles the logistics of doing a phone bank, of having a social media effort where everybody gets together and works on graphics, posts images, contacts people. Again, we'll get into that later. And then a media intern, so somebody who specializes in social media as probably a student can to just kind of oversee those efforts and make sure that things match and make sense. And then we want to get 40 volunteers, so for every intern, you know, our hope is that we'll have 10 others that are volunteering. Next, we want to hear 10 personal stories of the impact of the truth in advertising issue for patients in our community. So not only do we want those emails, we also want to get some impactful stories for us to be able to communicate in some way to our state representatives in this situation. And then we want to get a segment on our local news network where we can discuss the issue. We're not going to talk deeply about media in this conversation, but that's just a goal that we have and something that can happen when you work with your community partners. And then some of the milestones along the way that are going to be worth celebrating with the team and helping make people feel valued is, you know, first when we get that team of at least four interns, then when we get 10 volunteers, our first partnership with some kind of community organization, and then when we hit that halfway point. And so going back to the conversation about PIRG, when we say 33 interns, 100 volunteers, I'm talking about this idea of spending zero dollars. So you may say, well, how are they interns if it's zero dollars? With the PIRG organization, interns are essentially somebody who signs up to be a consistent volunteer. So in our case, the minimum was, I believe it was about 10 hours a week of working on the project. You can set it as low as whatever you want, maybe four hours a week or five hours a week, but just people who were consistent and going to be showing up to projects as they appeared. And they knew that we were not offering money because there are other things that you can offer to get somebody to sign up to be involved, especially in your position as a physician. So we want to build our message and our foundation now. So we've got the goals in mind. What are we trying to communicate? And then we'll look at building our team. So we've got to get a message that is short, sweet and memorable. So things that we can really focus on and highlight to get people's attention. And then again, one of the last things you really want to figure out before you build your team is what is non-negotiable about what you're doing when it comes to the mission, the vision and plan. So with PIRG, our focus, we were a non-partisan, non-profit organization. We were looking at working with college students specifically for the voter registration issue, and we were registering them to vote. Now, non-negotiables, non-partisan. If we were partisan, we were getting ourselves in trouble as a non-profit organization and with many of our partners and grants and things that we were receiving. So it was non-negotiable. If you were going to be an intern or a volunteer, you were not going to talk about partisan issues. You were not going to get involved in partisan conversations with people you were registering. Then it was non-negotiable that we were working with college students. That was our group. Those are the people we were trying to register to vote, not another population. So negotiable things. Even though I was focused at the University of Florida, that was my campus, we were willing to work with people who were outside of the University of Florida. We were willing to register students who were outside of the University of Florida. Our focus was college students. And plans to vote. So as I mentioned earlier, if somebody was already registered, we still had actions for them to take and ways that they could be involved and giving them a plan to vote was one of those. So truth in advertising, here's our message. We want transparency from healthcare professionals in advertisements and office visits. So physicians, physician's assistants, nurse practitioners, nurse anesthetists, et cetera, should be introducing themselves and their role clearly any time they see a patient. We want patients to know who they are working with. And non-MDs or DOs who use the title doctor in clinical settings must state their licensure and that they are not a medical doctor or physician in every encounter. And I'm taking that directly from the materials that were passed in the Georgia Truth and Transparency Act. So that was kind of a baseline for me to see what was effective for advocacy. And ultimately, I'm just trying to emulate that issue as we explain how to put these things into practice. So the foundation, when we talk about our focus, we're looking at contacting our representatives in the state. So I'm referring to, I'm in District 29 in Alabama. So my state senator for District 29 and my representative for, I believe I'm in District 68 for representatives in the state. Nonpartisan. So that is our focus. We're not taking on any partisan issues. We're just talking about this as a healthcare issue. And then we're focusing on the level of training, education, and licensing because we respect all of the individuals involved in our healthcare team. We're not trying to say these people don't belong. We're not trying to say we have any issues with these groups. We just want the training, the education, the licensing to be clear to patients. So again, and that goes into our non-negotiables. It's not negotiable that it is a nonpartisan issue. And it's not negotiable that we're not going to be disrespecting anybody that's a part of the healthcare team. We are highlighting the differences and communicating what we think is in the patient's best interests. And that's it. So what is negotiable? If somebody is on the team and they really want to contact local and federal representatives, or we're phone banking and we call somebody about this issue and they think that they want to take it on at a federal level, you can do that. We're willing to have you do that, but that's not our focus for this time and this issue. And then negotiable pre-med students. I'm going to be talking about those when it comes to building a team. I think that's the right group for this advocacy issue. But if somebody else wants to help the team, if we poll our patients at the clinic and we have somebody who's 65 years old, but has had a negative experience or feels strongly about this issue, they are more than welcome to be an intern, to be a volunteer, to do whatever they want. We're happy to work with them. So building our team in the case of PERG, obviously with us being a college student issue, we were grabbing college students. The big lesson we learned from that really, or at least that I learned is that college students are the ideal team for advocacy issues. I think there we'll go into it. They're easy to recruit. They're looking for ways to get involved, especially you as a physician, pre-med students want to work with you. Pre-med students want to work with you badly, very badly. So these are people that you can get on board really easily. College administrators, faculty partners, and clubs and organizations for both of these, the big lesson is just ask. These people, again, they're passionate about this group of college students. They're working for them. They're serving them. They're helping out in any way that they can. If you want them to do something, the worst thing that can happen is that they say no, but you should be asking them if they can contact students, if they'll send emails out for you, if they'll let you speak in front of their class, all these things. You'd be surprised what they're willing to do. I was able to give a ton of presentations about voter registration for the first three or four minutes of many faculty members' classes, and I think if you were to speak to a biology or chemistry professor in your local community about how you want to work with pre-med students, they would probably be happy to give you a minute or two or maybe more of their time to go and present on the advocacy issue of why you need their help. So we're going to build our team here in Dothan, Alabama, where I am located. Again, our ideal team is pre-med college students. If we aren't able to hit our metrics of four interns and 40 volunteers, then we'll start looking at high school students may be involved in pre-med groups, but we're going to start with pre-med college students. So who do we have access to? Again, free Google Maps. I went on Google Maps. I searched college. We've got two colleges in the area. We've got the Troy University Dothan campus, and we've got the Wallace Community College. Both of these, the next thing we're going to do is find out, do they have pre-med students? And yes, both do. So at Wallace, they have a pre-medicine and pre-osteopathic medicine track for students. And then we love it at Troy. They've got a pre-osteopathic medicine specific program. So that's great. That's awesome. So we're going to reach out to both, but maybe we'll start with Troy first. So what do you have to offer these students when we're taking on this advocacy issue? Volunteer hours. If students work with you and they're contacting their legislators, you can help them get volunteering hours that they need for their clubs, maybe for a distinction at their college, whatever it might be. Again, an internship. Just because it doesn't pay doesn't mean you can't call it an internship, especially if they're consistently working with you. The big one, letter of recommendation. It doesn't take a long time to write a letter of recommendation, but it is a big offer to students. If you are able to give a presentation, you tell students, hey, look, if you work on this advocacy team, I'll be able to, you know, meet with you once a month or something like that. And when it comes time, I'll offer you shadowing opportunities, or I'll offer you a letter of recommendation if you're an effective member of the team and help us to get things done. You know, if you're consistent, these students will be begging to work with you. I'm just telling you that. I know this. And then, you know, something that they don't always know but that you can work with them on is that you're building the potential for them to tell an interesting story on their CV, on their resume, when they interview for medical school, or if they go in a different direction. You know, hey, I worked with an osteopathic physician on advocacy issues, and we helped contact over 2,000 individuals and convinced them to send emails to their local representatives at state congress. So who do you contact for this? You're going to contact the medical clubs and organizations. So at Wallace, they have an American Medical Student Association chapter. You could also reach out to that Rural Health Association. Pre-med advisors. So both of these programs, when we have a pre-med program, that means there's going to be an advisor. If you can't find it easily on the website, in this case, I didn't find that specific person, you just contact the department head of biology or chemistry, and they're going to get you in contact with that person. And then basic science professors. All their emails are available on here. Just send those emails out. Ask them for what you need. So then what do you want? You know, you got to be clear with whoever you're contacting what you're asking from them. So here are a few ideas of what you might do to take on the issue. You want an email sent to all students in their club or organization, in the class that they run, or in their entire department. Maybe you want an opportunity to speak or table in front of their lecture or event. If you're going to be tabling, you want to have materials for them to take. Graphics with purpose. Maybe some of the research and evidence you found about the advocacy issue. And then you want a way to get their contact info. Maybe you want a partnership with the organization for a single or recurring volunteering event. So maybe you want to work with the American Medical Student Association at Troy to host a couple volunteering events where they phone bank their friends to get people to send emails out on this issue. And then again, you want to collect emails from anybody who will share it and start building your list of volunteers that you can reach out to about advocacy issues. So here's where we get to the AI part of the conversation. So when I was looking at this issue, I was saying, look, I want to write an email, but it's going to take me a while. I'm a very particular person. So let's see what ChatGPT can do. So I typed in, write me an email to a pre-med advisor to recruit pre-medical students to volunteer on a political advocacy effort demanding transparency from health care professionals on their education, license, and training. What it put out was pretty good, y'all. It was pretty good. I'll let you read this yourself with the PowerPoint if you want to. But they covered, you know, here's what the campaign goals are. Here's what their participation has to offer them. Let's discuss further if you are interested in this. At the very least, they can just forward the message to their students and all your contact info is there. So when it comes to building that team, if you've sent out this email, you've contacted, maybe you've gotten an opportunity to speak in front of the class, you can do the same thing with ChatGPT. Give me a two-minute presentation to talk about this issue in front of students. And then you go in and edit it yourself. You know, there are always changes and things to make, but you'd be surprised. It puts out some pretty good stuff to get started. So the priority is, as soon as you got the team, get them organized on a communication platform. GroupMe is kind of a popular one. Again, this is a free tool. Essentially, if you have a team, they're probably not going to like it if you make a group text with everybody. But if you have it on a platform like GroupMe or WhatsApp, people are going to be more amenable to responding while giving them a chance to keep their personal life separate from their volunteering activities. You want to contact your volunteers quickly. If you go and you give this presentation and you have five people sign up, you need to contact them that night. Or if you already have your campaign director intern, make sure that they are checking every day for who is signing up from your emails, from your various activities, to get them involved and tell them about the first thing they can do as a volunteer or what they need to do to get involved as an intern. And then you really want to start identifying your leaders and connecting with them early. So when it comes to saving you time, everybody deserves a little bit of your time if they're helping you on this advocacy issue and you are running it. But it doesn't have to be a lot of time. But if you have leaders, in this case, those four interns, you want to give them 15 minutes of your time when they get started to communicate with them, to show your appreciation, and to give them a vision for why they should be passionate and excited about what they're going to be doing. So now we kind of transition to making use of our team. So it's not going to follow as much of that issue lessons learned from PERG and then application. That's kind of a little bit all mixed together as we talk about this conversation. But the main avenues through which we were successful at getting students to register to vote was phone and text banking. That's kind of the number one. Social media outreach, which had not been a thing for PERG prior to COVID and the pandemic, of course, but took over. For us to solve the problem, community partnerships, a specific day or week of action to get people energized and excited for, and then seeing if you can incorporate competition into what you're doing. So phone and text banking. This is kind of the bread and butter of what PERG was doing. Ultimately, again, there's an aspect of financials involved in this. When we were getting close to the voter registration deadline, PERG did purchase lists of student phone numbers from various resources to be able to call students. But before that time, really what we were doing is called friend contacts. So anybody that was volunteering or interns, essentially, we were asking them, go into your phone, start calling anybody that you know that is in college right now and asking them if they want to register to vote. But really to make that event effective, the things that you're going to need to do are first set a time and date for an in-person or virtual gathering. If it's virtual, Google Meet is free and you can have up to about 100 people in an event. If you have some funds, Zoom is a little better for something like this, but you can make it work there. Then you need a script with the ask. So we're going to look at ChatGPT again for that, whether it be a phone call that you're asking the person to make, an email that you're asking them to send, or both. Then you need a spreadsheet to be able to track the calls that were made and the commitments that were made. Again, Google Sheets, free, easy to use. Then you need to train your volunteers. Phone banking doesn't take a lot of training, but people are nervous to make phone calls. So you just need to walk them through, hey, the script is here. Here's what you need to do. You need to smile while you're doing this. People can hear the difference. If you run into XYZ problems, here's how you might be able to solve them and just get people excited. Then you've got to make it as easy as possible for people to take action. So whatever that ask is, whether it be the people that you call making a phone call to their rep, sending an email, you need to simplify that process. So it's something they can do within a click or two. Type up your team. I already jumped ahead and said that. Then when it comes to actual calling, the priority is double dialing and texting. Most people nowadays have find my phone on, or they get scam calls from a different number each time. But if you call twice in succession, people are more likely to pick up. And then if you send a text message, that's a good way to get more responses to happen. So it takes a little longer, but in an hour, our goal usually was to get five to eight successful phone conversations. And then you want to look for leaders at those events who can help coordinate future events. So of course, your interns are going to be the ones that you prioritize, but you can start having your other volunteers work with your interns and maybe become interns. I mean, nobody says you have to stop at four. This is just what I set as the goal for this advocacy event. Maybe you have a smaller team at the start, but as you build momentum, you get a bigger one. So more on phone and text banking, you got to set a target. So I would say in an hour, your goal is 20 calls. I said earlier, five to eight. So 10 email commitments might be a little high, but four commitments to make a phone call. So you call, you get on the line with five to eight people. Your goal is to get each one to send an email commitment and maybe a few of them to submit to call their representative, which is ultimately a little more impactful, I would say. Then you got to recruit the volunteers. So you've got your interns, maybe some lead volunteers, but you need them to contact people in your community or get in contact with your volunteers at Wallace, Troy, whatever your local organization or group looks like, and send it out to your email list that you've started to collect the volunteers. Then you got to make the team feel appreciated. Again, if you have a budget, it's a good idea to provide some foods or snacks. It's not necessary, though. We were really successful with getting students involved. And again, we were not buying anyone anything. I didn't buy a single one of my interns a single product, but I made them feel that they were doing something valuable. I reminded them that I appreciated their efforts. And we focused on the vision, which was getting people to register to vote. And we were successful and people felt appreciated. And then you want to assess your results. So as I mentioned, you know, we were usually getting five to eight calls and realizing now that the 10 email commitments is a little bit higher than what might be reasonable. So you sit back, you look at what happened, helps you revise goals for future things. Maybe you upgrade them, maybe you bring them down a little bit. And then if there were people who were willing to do both, you know, maybe you look at working with them further. So something I'm going to mention next in the chat DBT conversations is for people who are doing both, have those conversations about seeing if they'll volunteer with you in the future. Or maybe, you know, you look into in the future, we want to add not only phone and email, but if somebody is willing to do all that, will they make a post on social media if we send them a graphic related to the issue? So again, script writing. So on the left, I've got the chat GPT script. And on the right, I've got my edits. So I just asked them to make me a phone script to get somebody to email and call their local rep. There were some things that weren't quite what I was looking for. So I made some edits. And then of course, you got to pause on a phone call to let people respond. And so I just provided those messages in there within the script to help the person who's reading it to make sure, you know, if somebody says yes, do this at the bottom, if they say no, at any time, you thank them, you get off the phone. Text banking. So we actually held both phone banking and text banking events. Although as I mentioned, for phone banking, usually if they weren't able to respond after the first two calls, we would send a text message as well. For younger people, if your advocacy issue is really focused on college students, or you're expecting your college students that are maybe volunteering with you to only be contacting people around their age or in their community, it might be better to just focus on texting. What I've found is that it's really easy to reach young people by starting your conversation with, hey, is this blah, blah, blah, instead of sending the whole blurb. Because if you've lived in a swing state during an election, and you've had a million messages about an advocacy issue, you know all those things are automated. The cool thing about text banking with an issue like this is that you are a real person. And the advantage that you have with these issues is that if your volunteers are texting these people as themselves, not as a conglomerate, they might be able to convince somebody to actually do something if they get the feeling, oh, I'm talking to a real person that wants me to do this, not just some machine that has my number and an algorithm to contact me. So that's a good thing to focus on when you're looking at your phone and text banking. So here is what we are asking them to do. So again, I said you got to make it easier for your people. So I generated an email. If you go to osteopathic.quorum.us, I believe it's the kind of Osteopathic Advocacy Network's platform. They have a way where you can put in your email, put in your address, and it automatically sends letters to your federal representatives for you. If you're working on this for free and you don't have a website to do that, I've got a great way to help you solve that problem because you want them to be able to send the email out as easy as possible. And again, if you're asking them to make a phone call to their rep, a lot of people are nervous to make phone calls. But if you give them a script that gives them that information and makes it easy, you just text them that message or email them that script and ask them to do it. Solves the problem for you. So here's the tool that I used. MailToLink.me. Essentially, this is a website. You type in .me and it takes you to the website. You type in who you want the email to go to. So in this case, I was looking at my senate rep, my rep to the state senate. I BCC'd myself. This is a great way to be able to track your actual success, whether you're hitting your goal or not. And I'm going to be using this tool to help me do that. So I'm going to go ahead and type in that email that I built with ChatGPT about the issue. And then you copy the code and it creates this horribly, horribly long HTML code that essentially has all of your message, including who to mail to and who to BCC. You can't really do anything with this. I tried texting it to myself. It doesn't do anything. But if you copy this entire text string and you go to tinyurl.com, this is a website that takes HTML script or code and turns it into a shorter website URL. You can make it work for people. So essentially what I did is I copied and pasted that entire thing into the your long URL section. And then I named my URL AL for Alabama District 29. And now if I copy this URL and send it in a text message to the person that I just called or texted and asked to send an email to their state representative. I don't have an example. They can open it up and it opens up directly to that email in their emailing app. So if you right now as you're watching this, if you type in tinyurl.com slash aldisc29 it's gonna open up your emailing app and have it where you could immediately send an email. Now please don't do this because you're probably not in this district, but it's a great tool. So for the phone banking and text banking, you want to have a spreadsheet to be able to track the success of what's going on. You would want to do a similar thing when we talk about social media as well if you're having people reach out to social media accounts, but you have the person put in, you know, who am I? I'm Ross. I'm the caller for each of these. Who is the person that I'm calling? Have them add their phone number because then other people can call them later. Might sound uncomfortable to some people, but it was never an issue with my students to add their friends phone numbers to the spreadsheet. If somebody asked to not be called, we just removed them from the list. Then did they pick up from the phone? So you can see success rates with people who are making those calls. Did they make a commitment to send an email, to make a phone call? Are they interested in volunteering with us in the future? And do we have any other notes that are relevant? So in this case, you know, we called John Smith. He said I'll send an email, but he does not ever want to be called again. So then we just purge him from the list afterwards so nobody contacts him. But Jane Doe, she's interested in everything. So now we've got her phone number and we can contact her about potentially volunteering with us for future events. Social media. I'm gonna keep this really short, but if you are a physician, people will follow you on social media if you talk about what you're doing as a physician. Now you have to be relatively consistent. There are some caveats, but essentially there is a huge, huge world of pre-med students and high schoolers who want to know more about what your day-to-day life is like and the procedures and the actions that you do and your thoughts on advocacy issues that if you create an account and you post once a day or a few times a week, you can build your own following in your local community and people will be interested in that. I'm not an expert to have that conversation, but it would be a great tool if you're interested in advocacy to look into something like that. And if you're building a team and you hire a media intern, you could have your media intern help make videos for you or they could, you know, give you advice on what they want you to record and then they edit and stitch your videos together for you. But it's something we're thinking about. You need a visual for people to be able to post or share if you are working with social media. So what I'm talking about when I think of this, I've got this message down here. There is a University of Florida account where they post the same picture of the university's president every single day on Facebook. And for whatever reason, a thousand people are following it. So I messaged them and said, next time you post the same picture of the president, will you include this link? And it was our bit.ly or another platform like TinyURL that directed people to where they could register to vote. And they did it. We contacted a ton of other campus organizations and clubs to do the same thing, but we had something to direct them there. And for some of them, we also sent them ideas of what they could post and graphics of things related to voter registration. And again, with that social media conversation, I just asked ChatGPT if it could come up with a funny idea to explain the importance of the truth in advertising issue. And it put this together. You can read it if you want. It's funny. It's interesting. But we'll move on. So in terms of creating graphics, I built this video of myself using Canva, their free platform, canva.com. Makes it really easy to create graphics. I'm not an artist in any way. All I do is I search what I'm looking for. I have three points I want to talk about. DOs, NPs, PAs. I search three-point graphic. I found this. I start to look for some cute little icons that I can use. Essentially, I just look at this health care worker. There are a bunch of free options. Some of those ones at the crown you have to pay for, so I just never use those. And I find images of health care workers. And I can just plug that into each of these sections, essentially, and it's going to help make it a cute little graphic. So I cut out some of the portions to just show what I'm doing in a faster way, but I've got a graphic that looks like a health care worker in a bunch of different ways. Because for many people, it can be confusing. There's no specific way that a DO or an MD dresses nowadays to really differentiate in a lot of cases. So again, I'm really using the template. I'm not changing much myself, but I'm trying to make something that's simple, easy to read, that gets the information across. So the question is, who is my health care provider? And are they a physician? So I'm going to skip ahead a little bit here. But essentially, I put in information on what their current education is. So of course, with a physician, at least a four-year doctoral program and a minimum of three years of residency versus a PA who has a 2 to 2.5 or 3-year master's program and an NP who could be anywhere from one to four years and a master's or a doctorate program. And then we kind of leave with this tagline. It's better to know exactly who is treating you. And in this case, I'm directing them to that same tiny URL link to be able to send an email out about the issue. We're going to talk more about links and ways to get people involved as well. And then I add this extra part of, you know, are they a physician? Or are they not a physician? Just to, again, make it clear. The OSMDs are physicians. The other folks, they're health care workers. They're involved in the team. They're not a physician. And we want people to be able to understand the differences. And then I save that image. So if I could go back and redo that image, I would actually change it from directing to the tiny URL for District 29 to Linktree. So this is another great free tool for collecting all of the efforts of what you're trying to accomplish for your group. So essentially, you can go to linktr.ee, and that is going to allow you to make a free Linktree account where you can collect all of the URLs or websites that you want to direct people to with everything that they need to take action. So if I have my phone call with somebody during my phone banking session, and they say, yes, I'll send an email out. I'll do a phone script. I'll even post something on my social media. What I'm going to do is after that conversation, I'm going to say, OK, I'm going to send you a text with everything that you need. If you have any questions, call me back or text me. And I'm going to send them a link to my Linktree account. That is linktr.ee slash truthact. And it has a link for them to sign up to volunteer. It has a link with the email call and text scripts on the same Google document, so they could copy and paste anything that they needed. And it has that direct link to send the email to the state senator for District 29. Now in Dothan, we have two different state senate districts, and I think a few other for our House of Representatives. And so I would actually go in and probably put one for each district and probably a link to help people find what district they're in if they don't know. Then I also did the same thing with this graphic that I created in Canva. So I go into Canva, and when you go to the sharing section, you can set it up so anyone with the link to your Canva can view it. I go right back into Linktree, and I add an additional link that directs them right to that Canva graphic. And now if they go to my home page, and you can do this again right now, you can go to linktr.ee slash truthact, and you can see all four of these links now. I've titled it Truth in Advertising Image. And so you could go in and save the image that I've created and post it on your social media. So community partnerships. You know, when you're looking to take on this issue, maybe you've already worked with the pre-med clubs, but you want to see if there are other organizations that aren't necessarily healthcare-associated that might be willing to help you out. You can look for policy interest groups, whether that be at the colleges that you're working with themselves or at a local high school, or just people interested in government in your community. If there are college athletics teams, we had a lot of success working with them to host voter registration, phone banking events, and then again, faculty in these groups. But you can look outside of, you know, the specific colleges themselves and look for other groups that can partner with you. So here's another one. You have Classics. They didn't want to post our image, but they did post our link to bit.ly slash UFO vote to get people registered to vote on their Instagram account. And so you can just look for these social media accounts that'll do the same thing. And eventually we were so successful at what we were doing that we started having people reach out to us to do service events. So one of the local fraternities at the University of Florida reached out and said, hey, you know, we want to send 30 guys to help phone bank with you. Can you let us know if you'd work with us? So word can get out. Then we got the conversation about Day of Action and competitions. So with PIRG, the big day for us was National Voter Registration Day, where all across every PIRG in all the states that we had them, our national organization was really trying to get the word out and make something big happen on this day because there were tons of other organizations that participate in this that would work with us. But we also had another Day of Action on the voter registration deadline for obvious reasons. So two big times where we brought our efforts together and where we could get the word out a little bit in advance to make it something big and important for folks. So you can see here on the right that we got a tweet from our organization about our partnership with UF's Graham Center, which was this policy group where they actually came out and spoke about our efforts. And they posted a graphic that we made about our competition, which is that to be successful in advocacy, another way is to get people to compete against each other. So in this environment in Dothan, if I have volunteers from both Wallace Community College and Troy University, I would create a competition to see who could get more phone banking hours or who could get more email or text commitments on a specific day or maybe not even a specific day. We just set a week of competition in advance. Like let's say, you know, we're building this team now from April 15th to 22nd. We're going to have a week of advocacy on our issue. And so we're going to see if Wallace Community College can get more volunteering hours and if they can get more commitments to send an email than Troy. And people love that. They love that. It's free. Then can you track your community partner's success? So, you know, again, with this Wallace versus Troy battle, we would want to create separate spreadsheets and tools to track each day so that we could contact the students on our volunteering list from each school and say, hey, you know, you're pulling ahead today or you're behind today. We really need more volunteer hours. And if they've got social media accounts, whether it be through the school itself or through clubs or organizations that are involved or a social media account, you create, you host live streams, you give shout outs to these organizations, you post highlights of what's happening to keep people in the know and excited. This is probably the most ridiculous part of this entire presentation, but it was also one of the most successful things that we did with PIRG. Students love memes. And so we really capitalized on that for National Voter Registration Day. And basically one of our volunteering events that I had my interns and volunteers do that we did at UF that we didn't do at any other Florida school because I came up with this idea was just to sit down for a couple of hours and build as many relatable memes that we could and then blast them out to everybody that has a social media at the University of Florida, every club, every organization that had our link to direct them to vote, to register to vote with us. And what do you know, National Voter Registration Day, as you can see on the right, we had over 500 students registered to vote on that day. So of the 900 or so, 911 or something that we got, 500 were on our day of action through communicating on social media with memes that relate to these individuals. So I don't know if I can say more about the impact of that, but that was really our trick and it helped out on the voter registration deadline as well. And all of the other Florida universities followed in our footsteps after that, had PIRG chapters to do kind of the same thing. And so they even wanted to partner with us for the competition and make it a four-person or four-school competition and made their own memes for that. So then we just got some of the highlights and I had some of the students that we reached out about volunteering, contacting us later, you know, saying things like we're a cult because we were such an organized and effective group at getting the message out that it drew folks' attention. So I'm going to mention that and I'm just going to show you where you can direct students to that if you're not comfortable with building something like this. We got this website imageflip.com, makes it really easy. You scroll down, you select the meme that you understand. If you understand any of them, you type in the text box your idea. So what I put, you know, it's different types of headaches and there's this one where it's the full headache and I say when I don't know if my health care provider is a D.O.M.D. doctor or a P.A.N.P.P.H.D. doctor. You know, obviously with something like this you want to find the balance of making sure that it's respectful and that it doesn't get into any problems, but I just wanted to put something together quickly to give you an idea of how easy it is to create something. So literally this 40, 50 second video is me building the entire thing, saving the image, and now you can post it somewhere. You just gotta have the idea. So again, with social media when we're looking at the truth in advertising issue, I just spent a little bit of time going onto the Instagram account for Troy Dothan and looking at who they were following. I found a couple of clubs that I would reach out to. The marketing club, they might be interested in marketing something related to an advocacy issue and posting on their social media story and the school newspaper because they might be willing to post about, hey we've got a group that's interested in doing health care advocacy and here's what they're up to and here's how you can get involved. So go on to the social media accounts, find the relevant clubs and orgs, contact not just the clubs and orgs but also students with large followings. And again, these are things just like the phone banking and text banking that you can put your volunteers on too. I'm not telling you as a however old adult you are that you need to get on Instagram and you need to do this, but you can put together a social media event where you have your students get together and brainstorm and find people in their network, in their community, at the school who can do this. So looking at community partnerships and our potential day of action for the truth in advertising issue. Are there patient advocacy organizations who might be passionate about this? Are there health care support groups that we can reach out to? Are there national and regional physician organizations that have a local chapter of physicians that we can contact? And are there days that are relevant to this? So for this issue I think patient safety awareness week and the second full week of March would be a relevant week of action to make something happen. Or National Doctors Day would be another great opportunity. So I searched just on Google through Dothan for potential partners for something like this and what I would do is I would reach out to the Wiregrass chapter of the Society of Hospital Medicine to see if they'd help us. I'd reach out to the Wiregrass Foundation to see if it would be of interest. Again, the worst they can say is no. So as we kind of get into the closing, just some priorities for, you know, this team that you've built and are trying to get to take on these actions. You know, if you are the main person that's working with them, if you're taking a really active role in this, everything is going to feed off of your energy, your passion, your commitment to this team. Now if that's somebody that you hire as an intern who's spending the most time with the team, it might be more them, but you are still going to be the figurehead in some ways and so it matters how you work with these people. You know, with advocacy issues, these volunteers are going to be here because they believe in the cause, but they're still relying on you for direction and again, the passion, the excitement to be successful. I really don't think you can be too thankful or appreciative. You know, if these people are volunteering for you for an idea that you were passionate about and built this network for, you got to continue to remind them that their efforts are appreciated. You know, when people are signing up to volunteer and they know they're not getting paid for something, they already know, so you don't have to, you know, feel bad all the time, like that should be clear from the very start, so your thoughts, your words, your compliments really mean more than you know. I loved my time at PIRG building my team at the University of Florida. The funny thing about it is, you know, we hit almost all of our goals were the voter registration and get out the vote and everything. We built an incredible team. They went on to found their chapter at the University of Florida and I left my role. I knew it was only a temporary opportunity for the voter registration specifically because that's the issue that I was passionate about and I wanted to make more than minimum wage and work 55 or 60 hours a week for this particular issue. So when I stepped away, you know, I was really proud to see that the team that I had built stuck around at the University of Florida's campus, but I stayed in consistent contact with some of the leaders that I really cared about and found out, you know, after they did a few efforts in the spring, they disbanded as an organization because the person who took over from my role didn't respect them, didn't respect their efforts and didn't care for them and everything fell apart. But the cool thing was that when it fell apart, the president, student president who had taken over, worked with the entire organization, all of the other volunteers and interns to walk out as a group. So even though it fell apart, they did it together because they had cared about their team and cared about each other even though the person who had replaced me in this role didn't give them that value. So I just say that again to focus on you as the leader. It all comes down to you and how you communicate and care and respect for these people. And then things we couldn't cover today. So I mentioned like we wanted to get a media effort. That takes a lot of work and preparation and that's not something that we did for our voter registration efforts. That was more on the national end of things. And then intern and leader development. There can be a lot of work that goes into that, but that's more of a leadership development thing that maybe should be talked about separately. And finally, I have the references after this, but I did want to point out the Student PIRGS website. So this is where my initial training materials went through. Everything we kind of talked about today is my memories and my experiences, but a lot of it is built on the ways that they trained me. So I of course want to give a shout out to their tools and resources. And if you go on there, they have a lot of information that you could use for whatever issue you want to take on. So I'd recommend checking it out if you're interested. And then we got our references for some of the slides. And that is everything that I have to talk about for now. So I'm happy to transition into a question and answer session. Thanks for your time.

advocacy team

community organizer

voter registration

college students

volunteer recruitment

political action

communication strategies

artificial intelligence

grassroots engagement

healthcare transparency