What’s the most important page on a union website? I’d suggest it’s not the home page, or even the General Secretary’s biography, but the online joining form.
In many unions, a majority of members are now joining online. But too often the forms that they use to do so are letting us down.
Continue reading How can we make it easier to join trade unions?
Just back from the TUC’s 150th anniversary Congress in Manchester, where we had a Digital Hub stall, helping delegates make the most of tech to follow the conference.
In between charging up delegates’ devices and demoing some of our own digital projects, we tried to make the most of this annual gathering of a real cross section of our movement by asking people about their own digital ideas and challenges.
4 days and several pads of jumbo sticky notes later, here’s a sample of what we found: Continue reading Congress 2018 digital hub – a snapshot of union digital
Digital offers unions ways to reach out to workers that we’d find hard to access traditionally, due to hostile employers, geographical dispersion or limited organiser resources. It can also provide powerful practical tools for workers to network and organise. But the benefit can be all the greater when you combine the two.
It’s something that’s working well for the OUR Wal-Mart campaign in the US, as campaign director Dan Schlademan and Tim Lyons of Reveille Strategy told a group of UK trade unionists this week at the TUC. Continue reading Online to offline organising – lessons from the US and Australia
Back in November, I spent an interesting day in the company of dozens of Thoughtworks staff and others from London’s tech community.
I was one of 6 presenters talking about real world problems that were affected by technology, and where a different use of technology could potentially make a large difference towards a more equitable society and economy. Continue reading Thoughtworks accelerator programme: The Digital Union
Congress is an evolving event, and year on year we’ve been increasing the levels of digital technologies that we use to run and communicate Congress. This year we’ve made a number of improvements, from our registration system, and email updates to help delegates prepare, to the captioning of delegates names when they appear on the big screen.
Another innovation we’re trying this year is our Digital Hub. It’s a space in our exhibition, on the first floor, that we’re going to be using to help support everyone who’s trying to do Congress digitally in 2017, and to promote ideas that unions could take up to improve their own digital work. Continue reading A Digital Hub for Congress 2017
Union joining forms are an important but often overlooked step in union organising. You need a process to get people into the union, check applicability in some cases, gather their contact data and set up appropriate payment routes.
Sometimes this means the forms get more complicated than they need to be. Having one guaranteed interaction with a new member means there’s a chance to gather lots of information that unions may or may not need in the future. However that can bloat forms and put people off from joining due to complexity or concern at sharing data. Continue reading User needs for union joining forms
The TUC’s digital healthcheck is a simple tool that you can work through in around 20 minutes, to help establish where your union stands on digital maturity.
An interactive Excel spreadsheet looks at six aspects of digital maturity – strategic approach, membership, communications, web presence, data, IT and systems. There are no right or wrong scores; is it rather a means to snapshot and analyse your union’s current position on the digital maturity journey. Continue reading TUC digital healthcheck
Coworker.org was founded in 2013 by former US labour organisers Jess Kutch and Michelle Miller. Jess skyped in to our digital fringe event at TUC Congress 2016 to tell us more about what they do, and what they’ve learned to date. Continue reading Coworker.org – A platform for worker voice
As you wrestle with how we improve the workplace, you have to think about power, says Antonia Bance. Otherwise we end up with tech that merely delivers greater convenience to people who don’t need it the most.
This video is a talk from the TUC fringe event “How can unions adapt to survive in a digital-first world?” at Congress 2016. Emma Mulqueeny OBE is the Founder/CEO of Rewired State and Young Rewired State, CEO of Elbi and a former member of the Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy, talks about the challenges for UK trade unions in reaching out to “97ers” – the generation of young people now entering the workforce. Continue reading What are the next 6 million union members going to look like?
