Fun Halloween Medical Practice Marketing and Morale Strategies

Happy Halloween! This fun little holiday offers great ways to market and boost morale for your clinic! Here are some simple ideas for Halloween and beyond:

1. Have a costume contest. Ask your staff dress up in some festive way and wear numbers, ask patients/visitors to place a number in the bowl on their way out, corresponding to their favorite costume. Give a prize to the team member with the most votes. Be sure to lay out ground rules for costumes, such as avoiding too-scary or otherwise inappropriate attire. This can be fun year-round too with theme days or weeks.

2. Have a pumpkin decorating contest. Ask each member of your staff to decorate a pumpkin, number them in the waiting room and again ask patients to vote for them. You may even go as far as to pick a winning patient and winning pumpkin. In this instance offer prizes to the winning staff member and give the patient the winning pumpkin. You could apply the same idea to decorate stockings at Christmas, fill Easter baskets in the spring, create four-leaf clovers for St. Patrick's Day, or maybe even a host a turkey coloring contest for Thanksgiving in a pediatric clinic.

3. Host a trick-or-treat or participate in one locally. This is especially fun in areas where you are near other businesses or clinics. Each business (or if you are large enough, each department) can create a fun little game with prizes for trick-or-treaters. Be sure to include business cards or other marketing material with your treats. Working with clients, I have found that the magnet business card is great for these type events. The kids get the candy, and the magnet gets put up on the fridge as a great reminder of who to call when someone is in need of medical services.

4. Sponsor a trick-or-treat bag. Have festive bags made up with your clinic information on them. Most of my clients hand these out at the check-out desk. Once Halloween is over, you can sponsor a bag at the next 5K or half marathon (or you could take it a step further and sponsor a booth).

5. Give out Halloween night safety tips. Design a full- or half-page tip sheet with safety tips for Halloween and hand it out to your patients. This could be tweaked to fit the changing of the seasons also with biking, camping, outdoors, boating safety, or skiing safety, depending on your geography and patient base.

6. Buy back candy. Yep, we have tons of offices that buy the candy back from kids at the rate of $1 per pound,the offices ship the candy to deployed soldiers overseas. You could also make this work for any other candy-laden holiday or simply hold a “candy-drive.”

7. Pink out your office. October is breast cancer awareness month, so pick a day, week, or even the whole month to “pink” your office. Your staff could dress in head-to-toe pink, you could switch out some furnishing/accessories in your office with pink, or your staff could just one item of pink. You could do this for any awareness month or day, pick something that speaks to you and your patients.

These ideas may be Halloween specific, but with a little tweaking they can be used for almost any holiday or occasion that you wish to have a little fun for your patients and your staff. There are tons of fun national holidays and even traditional holidays where these ideas would apply. The key is to pick something that is fun, appropriate, and even better if it helps the community. What fun activities has your office planned lately?