John Wood, Author at TUC Digital Lab

Understanding your union’s direct debit options

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 to the union’s administration its bottom line.

Designing your union’s data dashboard

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 draw from observing it over time.

An analytics guide for unions

Doing more with data is a huge opportunity for unions. This report sets out the basis for a common framework for using data that can be adopted by unions to understand, report on, and improve the way they serve members across the entire member lifecycle.

Building union CRM together – ACTU Union Innovation Hub case study

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 really keen to hear more about this one because it’s one of the union movements most ambitious collective investments globally at the moment. And as we’ve got a bunch of unions currently putting their own CRM systems under the microscope here in the UK, there could be a lot of takeaways for us from how they’ve approached the same issues.

Working with members on new content ideas around the cost of living

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 and digital design agency Yalla Cooperative to run a user research project that could help union comms teams make choices around how they could develop this work in a useful way for members and the union.

#StrikeTech – Unions using digital tools to build and win disputes

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 our way. We’ve got to contend with the some of the harshest regulations and thresholds on balloting and conducting strikes in industrialised economies. And many within the Conservative government are currently threatening to make this even worse.

How to start a CRM change project in your union

Many unions are currently considering the future of their membership databases. For some, products are being retired or contracts coming to an end. For others, a run of high pressure large ballot campaigns has highlighted a need for greater accuracy and agility. In some, there are fewer developers with the expertise to support an older system, and it’s simply time to move to a new one.

For most unions, taking this step forward is also taking a step into the unknown. We’ve used the same systems for a long time, we’ve bolted on processes over the years which are unique to our union. And moving to a new system is a risk – it’s expensive, time-consuming, means transferring a large amount of data, and depends on everyone getting trained and enthused about using the new system.

Is check-off checking out?

Join Together look at the pros and cons of check-off subscription payments, whether they might leave unions open to attack by an adversarial government, and what unions could do about it.

Managing CRM change projects in unions

As unions digitise more and more of their operations, new tech tools are becoming essential across all their functions. However, the systems used to manage membership data are still the most critical that unions rely on.

This new TUC Digital Lab report looks at Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems from the perspective of the union movement.

Improving inclusivity in online union meetings

Many unions found that the number of people attending union events and meetings rose during the pandemic, as events moved online. Also the diversity of members attending grew, as many of those who had previously found in-person meetings difficult could now join in.

But online events are not universally inclusive either, and present many of their own issues for inclusivity. There’s now a challenge to unions to make sure as many people as possible can participate as fully as possible.