John Wood, Author at TUC Digital Lab

AI Summit is dominated by Big Tech and a “missed opportunity”, civil society orgs tell PM

More than 100 civil society organisations from across the UK and world have branded the government’s AI Summit as “a missed opportunity”. In an open letter to Rishi Sunak they warn the “communities and workers most affected by AI have been marginalised by the Summit” while a select few corporations seek to shape the rules.

Managing big tech changes in UK unions

Deploying new technology can often be challenging.

But deploying technology that will change organisations and how the people within them do their work is generally a lot more complicated than just the technology itself. As distributed organisations, with many stakeholders and complex democratic structures, unions have a lot to consider.

Award-winning digital tools for reps: NEU case study

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’ ballots were progressing, and integrated comms tools to scale their own work in communicating with members to deliver in their own area.

The NEU’s Mike Joslin joined a TUC Digital Lab webinar to look deeper into what they did, and the results it helped them get for their campaign.

Using WhatsApp in union organising and communications

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 are possible within small interest groups or up to hundreds of people at once.

What is shadow IT? And why should unions care?

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.

Introducing cloud CRM platforms for unions

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 a long while, and there’s a potential jump in terms of moving to a newer generation of cloud CRM tools. The market leaders in this space have many ways in which they differ from traditional membership databases, and in which they differ from each other. So there’s a lot to get our heads around as we do our research.

Change management to support union tech projects

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.

The world of campaigning is about to change forever

Large Language Models (LLMs) are the next wave of tech that will radically change political campaigning and advertising, says the NEU’s Mike Joslin.

Design principles for a new union CRM project

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 what we do.

The principles can be a useful lens to view projects through. And with so many unions currently embarking on CRM change projects, I thought it might be good to revisit them in the context of CRM change, to see how each one might inform a new project.

Preparing for major union campaigns online

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 in a major campaign. It’s more viable than ever before to reach out to members and potential supporters at scale, and to mobilise them in new ways.