Every year, the TUC hosts the Union Campaigns and Communications awards, which highlights good practice in comms work across TUC affiliates over the year. Winning this year’s category for best communications with reps and activists was the NEU’s Pay Up! campaign, which developed a dedicated portal for activists, giving them insight into how the unions’ … Continue reading Award-winning digital tools for reps: NEU case study

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WhatsApp is the most used app in the world, with an estimated 30.1 million users in the UK alone. While it’s best known as a messaging service, it also includes audio and video calls, voice messages, and sharing for photos, files and links.  The service allows group communication as well as marketing communication. Shared conversations … Continue reading Using WhatsApp in union organising and communications

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At the TUC, we’re currently embarking on a project to identify and rationalise the shadow IT that our organisation uses. It’s one of our biggest digital and data risks, and will be for most unions as well. First some definitions. When we’re talking about “shadow IT”, we mean the use of a whole secondary set … Continue reading What is shadow IT? And why should unions care?

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 Modern unions buy in so many different types of services. At the Australian union federation ACTU’s Union Innovation Hub we’ve looked across a huge range of them to try to save our unions money. In terms of digital tools, that’s included things like CRM, websites, survey tools, event tools, campaign tools, learning management systems, membership … Continue reading Getting the best deals on tech for unions – lessons from negotiation and group-buying at the ACTU

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We asked unions last year about what they wanted in terms of shared activity around the CRM projects so many of us are going through. One of those things was more to demystify the market for platform CRM, and which products are out there.  Many of us have been using particular membership database products for … Continue reading Introducing cloud CRM platforms for unions

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Implementing a new CRM or other core tech project without paying attention to how you manage the change within the union is risky. At best you may end up missing out on key benefits, and at worst, fundamentally limiting the union’s ability to operate on the new tech. We ran a session with independent IT … Continue reading Change management to support union tech projects

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At Nautilus International, we’ve been working on a digital engagement project to improve the on-boarding process for our cadet members. The situation Nautilus represents maritime professionals working at sea and ashore. We’re a transnational union with about 20,000 members in the UK, Netherlands and Switzerland. We cover people who are experienced in senior roles, through … Continue reading A dedicated onboarding journey for young members – Nautilus International case study

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When we set up the TUC Digital Lab, the first thing we did was to work with unions to devise a set of 8 digital design principles to help inform our work. They’ve stood up pretty well over the years and been useful to us on many occasions in steering the choices we make in … Continue reading Design principles for a new union CRM project

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The need for unions to mount and sustain large scale campaigns has grown in recent years. We’ve seen major national industrial disputes for many unions. Fundamental challenges such as government attempts to curtail the right to strike. And for those unions who are politically affiliated, an upcoming general election campaign. Digital technologies increase our options … Continue reading Preparing for major union campaigns online

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Direct Debit has been really important to unions. It helps safeguard union income against the threats to check-off dues collection. And it also helps us make more of the opportunities for a direct and personalised membership experience with our members. For most unions, running Direct Debits as efficiently as possible will be a real boon … Continue reading Understanding your union’s direct debit options

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To launch our new analytics guide for unions, we held a webinar with its author, Sam Jeffers of Join Together. Sam talked us through the rationale behind the report, and its suggested framework for helping unions define the data they want to monitor, the ways they will gather it together, and the lessons they can … Continue reading Designing your union’s data dashboard

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We’ve been expanding our use of social video at the TUC, to make the most of networks like TikTok and YouTube. These networks give us the possibility of reaching beyond the more politically engaged people that we regularly get to on Twitter. But for a video to land well with different audiences, we’ve had to … Continue reading Making great social media videos – four quick formats that work

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The ACTU’s Union Innovation Hub is a really ambitious program of group-buying and co-design for core membership software for Australian unions, used by around 30 unions across different states, Chris Walton and Stephen Gargano joined us for a Digital Lab webinar, to talk about what they’ve done, and how they went about it. I’ve been … Continue reading  Building union CRM together – ACTU Union Innovation Hub case study

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Over the past five years our digital projects team have been working to transform PCS, based on the back of a move to the cloud CRM platform Salesforce and Microsoft Office 365. We started our journey with Salesforce in 2018. Initially we worked with a Salesforce partner called Fonteva. Fonteva developed membership organisation functionality with … Continue reading Next steps in CRM for unions: 3 years on from PCS’ Salesforce move

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The cost-of-living crisis is having a huge impact on our members’ lives. Unions are working to help members win better increases to pay, but there could also be opportunities for us to offer members advice, community, news or practical help around other aspects of the situation. The TUC Digital Lab worked with several trade unions … Continue reading Working with members on new content ideas around the cost of living

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At PCS, we took the decision a few years back to modernize our membership database with Salesforce – a modern platform CRM system. That’s been an important underpinning for this work as it allowed us to take on deeper and more responsive tech projects in many areas around member data. Where it’s been particularly helpful … Continue reading Data for industrial action balloting – PCS case study

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There are a whole bunch of challenges for union members in exercising their right to strike, and being able to raise sufficient pressure to win their disputes. Some of those are newer trends that have been born out of the pandemic. Some have been growing for a long time. Firstly there are the hurdles in … Continue reading #StrikeTech – Unions using digital tools to build and win disputes

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For the RMT national ballot this year, we wanted to organize a turnout campaign that was based on measurable success. And one that helped us get across the doubly punitive hurdles for transport unions from the Trade Union Act. We had 42,000 members to canvas, across 15 different employers. Adding in numerous distinct grades and … Continue reading Using P2P SMS in a strike ballot campaign – RMT case study

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Social media has been prominent in our recent campaigns, but the first point I want to make is that whilst it’s very visible, it’s not a silver bullet. Amongst all the things we do to get a vote out, it is quite far down the ladder. Other forums are often higher in our priorities – … Continue reading Using social media in strike ballot campaigns – CWU case study

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