John Wood, Author at TUC Digital Lab

The Digital Skills Shortfall

Grassroots union digital group Organise Lab release a new survey looking into the digital training needs and expectations of union reps.

How can unions and professional bodies address social media hate?

CSP’s Rob Yeldham has documented a discussion series he organised with unions and other organisations, looking at issues around social media and the growth of the far right.

Video: Retaining members webinar

The value of retaining union members is obvious. Unions should always be recruiting new members, but losing them unnecessarily means you need to work even harder to grow.

This TUC Digital Lab webinar launched our new guide “A six-step plan to retaining more members”. Sam Jeffers of Join Together and Guste Matuleviciute of RCM joined unions to introduce some of the ideas in the guide.

A six-step plan to retaining more members

Here’s a fact of union life – all members leave, one way or another.

They often do it for a reason you can do nothing about. They might stop working in an industry, decide to study, emigrate, retire and so on.

Video: Visualising union membership data

Unions have huge amounts of data to draw on in our membership records. But how do you get that data into the hands of the people in a union who need it, and how do you support them to understand how to act on it?

Unlocking the membership data building up in our CRM systems will tell us a lot about the ongoing operation of our unions, and the experiences of our members. And combining this with easy visual representations can help colleagues around the organisation to identify opportunities for growth, retention, organising and impact.

A context guide to generative AI for unions

Generative AI tools are being introduced into workplaces across all sectors and, whether officially or informally, will be being used inside many trade unions too.

Tools such as ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot offer potential for increases in productivity in many common tasks. But at the same time, the hype around generative AI has obscured a range of potential limitations, societal harms and organisational risks.

Video: Visualising data for union bargaining and organising

We all know that the best decisions are those that are grounded in relevant and accurate data. But how do you get that data into the hands of the people in a union who need it, and how do you support them to understand what it could tell them?

One important development could be the growth of dedicated business analytics tools in the union, such as Tableau and Microsoft Power BI.

Video: Shadow IT and unions: How do we keep innovation without adding risk?

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To launch our new report on managing Shadow IT in unions, author Simon Parry presented to a TUC Digital Lab webinar on the subject.

Managing Shadow IT in unions

Shadow IT is the use of technology in an organisation without formal approval or oversight. It particularly refers to online, Software as a Service (SaaS) tools. That could mean reps using private Google accounts for union email, organisers setting up WhatsApp groups for member communication, or staff setting up new tools like Survey Monkey to gather information from members.

These unofficial solutions often get used due to their effectiveness and ease of setup, coupled with the sometimes slow modernisation of official IT tools provided by the union.

Union tech survey 2024 – some thoughts on the results

At the TUC Digital Lab, we get most of our good ideas from the unions we collaborate with. One such need we found recently was for unions to know more about the various IT tools that other unions were using.

The ideas was that by compiling a shared list of tools, unions could see where there were union colleagues that they could network with around best practice with specific tools, or ask for references for systems they might be considering. And they could see how their own tools and IT capacity measured up against the rest of the movement.