Culture Votes

The Idea

Every week, performing arts venues fill rooms.

Night after night, theaters, concert halls, rock clubs, comedy clubs, and cafes, have touring and local shows across comedy, music, spoken word and poetry nights; audience after audience of exactly the kind of engaged, community-minded people that every voter registration drive is trying to reach.¹

Most of those rooms never see a voter registration table.

Culture Votes exists to change that: not by turning arts events into rallies, but by making civic participation as easy as showing up somewhere you already wanted to be; and by providing venues and producers with an easy path to participate: downloadable digital and printable materials that give your audience immediate and direct access to current voter registration information.

Why Performing Arts Spaces

Voter registration works best when it meets people in moments of openness; when they’re gathered, energized, and in community with strangers they’re about to share something with. That describes almost every live arts event.

Beyond logistics, there’s something deeper: the performing arts community has always been disproportionately civically engaged. Comedians who write about the administration. Playwrights staging the housing crisis. Musicians whose set lists double as social commentary. These artists are already doing advocacy: in their work, with their platforms, and in the communities they perform for.

Culture Votes asks: what if we made it easier for that energy to translate into concrete civic participation right there in the room?

How It Works

Culture Votes is a partnership between Laughing Impact Project and performing arts venues, producers, and promoters who want to embed voter registration into their spaces and events.

For venues and producers:

• We provide materials, coordination, and, where available, trained volunteers to staff a registration table
• We handle the logistics so your team doesn’t have to: tracking current registration forms, digital sign-up integrations, etc.
• Events can participate at whatever level fits their space and audience, from a posters and digital signage to a staffed table in the lobby, or even a brief stage announcement during intermission

For artists:

• We can connect you with the voter registration infrastructure so that your existing audience engagement (the content of your performance, commentary or call-outs) has a waiting, in-room concrete civic step
• No scripted messaging required. You talk to your audiences the way you always do; we just make sure the next step is there when they’re ready for it.

What We’re Building

Culture Votes is in active development. We’ve assembled a resource toolkit with brandable digital screen images, social shares, and print-ready 11x17 and 8.5x11 files (you can see state-level guides here) that all point to our hosted Need to Know Info and direct-link to current registration portals for your state.

Onboarded partners can download them branded with their logo, and integrate them into their existing spaces like upcoming calendar slideshows and high-footraffic areas. (unbranded versions of all resources are availble for partners and non-partners alike)

Sign-on your event(s) or venue here: Culture Votes Sign-On

Looking for deeper integration?. When you sign-on, you will be asked if you’d like to join Partner Match, as well. Partner Match is our continuous-running program to bring togther aligned performaning arts events and advocacy organizations.

If you are looking for something specific, or have another question, you can always get in touch via our contact page.

Who This Is For

• Venues that want to add a civic layer to their existing programming without disrupting the experience
• Producers and promoters booking events where audience engagement is already part of the culture
• Artists who want to turn their platform into a direct path to civic participation
• Organizations already doing voter registration work that want to extend into performing arts spaces

If you’ve ever thought we should be doing something, this is the something.