Brian Young is the founder and director of Action Network – a progressive tech co-op that’s become a backbone for digital campaigning and organising across the US labour and progressive movements. It operates the Action Network campaign CRM internationally, and is currently about to offer its organising toolset Action Builder to Europe for the first time.
Brian’s experience spans decades of union and political campaigns and organising, so when we found he was passing through the UK, we were keen to get him in front of a room of union campaigners and organisers. Here’s a bit of what he told us.
Engagement as a spectrum – from mass mobilising to deep organising
Brian opened with a challenge to the way we often talk about “engagement” in digital campaigning. The term is often thrown around as if it’s a single thing to measure. But engagement is best understood as a spectrum. It ranges from mass, low-impact communications at one end, to deep, high-impact organising at the other.
At the “efficient but low-power” end, you have tools like email and mass texting. These can reach thousands at once. They can mobilise people at critical moments, keep members informed, and bring new supporters into the fold. But each individual interaction is relatively shallow.
At the “high-power but low-efficiency” end, you find the one-to-one conversations that are the lifeblood of organising – trusted contacts talking to colleagues in the workplace, building collective power and resilience one relationship at a time. These interactions are powerful, but by their nature, they’re not efficient or easily scalable.
Both ends of the spectrum are essential. The challenge for unions is to use digital tools to maximise both reach and depth, without mistaking one for the other.
Tools are just tools
A recurring theme in Brian’s talk was the need to see technology as a means, not an end. The real work of organising, building relationships, understanding what matters to members, developing leaders, can’t be automated or outsourced to technology.
Tech tools can help us move faster and further – to communicate, gather information, and coordinate action. But having them doesn’t automatically mean your campaigns will work. Their value depends entirely on how unions use them.
Brian illustrated his points with stories from the US.
1. The minor league baseball players’ union drive
One of the most striking stories was the successful unionisation of minor league baseball players, something that had been tried and failed for many years. This was a workforce of 5,500, scattered across 120 teams, many of them migrant workers living in precarious conditions and on casualised contracts.
The campaign began with digital forms to gather contact information and identify key issues. Organisers used the data to map out leaders on each team, then assigned tasks and follow-ups through Action Builder.
Over two playing seasons, they built relationships, held online events, including professional development opportunities, and kept in constant touch.
When the time came to go public, the overwhelming majority of players signed union cards, beating the threshold by a long way. The employers conceded and recognised the union, which was able to win a 300% pay rise and dramatically improved conditions.
The technology had enabled organisers to scale up relationship-building and track progress in real time, even with a fragmented and mobile workforce. But the heart of the campaign was still the traditional tactic of conversations and connections between people.
2. Minnesota Nurses Association
This nurses’ union faces a regular three-year contract cycle. To keep members engaged between negotiations, they used Action Network forms to gather feedback, educate members about the process, and organise events.
By combining mass communication with opportunities for deeper involvement, such as local meetings and one-to-one conversations, they built a sense of connection and ownership among members.
Brian emphasised that regular, authentic engagement is crucial. If we only reach out to members in times of crisis, trust and solidarity erode. Building the “muscles” of engagement in quieter times ensures that unions are ready to mobilise when it matters most.
3. Public Service Alliance of Canada
During a major strike by a 300,000 member union, PSAC used Action Network’s distributed events tool to help members find and join picket lines. Members could enter their postcode, find the nearest picket, and sign up to join in.
The tool made it easy for organisers to manage hundreds of events and for members to get involved. An unexpected bonus was that journalists started using the tool to find events they could go to for local broadcast, leading to positive media coverage.
But technology alone doesn’t drive turnout. Brian talked about the “myth of the motivated but directionless activist”. People get involved because they have built up a strong supporting identity for an issue, not simply because a new tool makes getting involved with any event easy, even if they don’t really care about it.
The best digital campaigns are those that complement, rather than replace, the hard work of organising.
Challenges for unions
In both the US and the UK, unions are operating in a context of rapid technological, political, and social change. Authoritarian movements are on the rise, social media is reshaping how people relate to each other, and traditional forms of collective action are under pressure. Brian outlined some big challenges for unions in how we approach our campaigns and organising.
Get past organisational inertia and securing buy-in
Large organisations, unions included, are by their nature built to continue to do what they’ve always done. Introducing new technology requires both top-down buy-in (to secure resources and political support) and bottom-up ownership (from those who will actually use the tools). Projects to adopt new tech will be as much about the people and processes as they are about the platforms.
Pilot projects are an invaluable to move towards change, but they need to be the right size. Too small and they aren’t seen as relevant in other situations, too big and they can be unmanageable.
Brian’s advice was to find a campaign with enough scale to matter, but not so much that new approaches get bogged down. Secure strong ownership from someone with implementation responsibility, often an organising director or campaign lead, and ensure leadership is on board to back the necessary investment.
Build up engagement levels before you need them
In many places there has been a long-term loss of connection between unions and their members. In the US this year, some unions have found themselves hollowed out by attacks from a hostile government, which left them struggling to quickly rebuild engagement channels and trust with members at the time they’ve needed it most.
That’s something we should consider too. Don’t wait for a crisis to start engaging members. Regular, meaningful communication based around member needs is essential. It powers mobilisation efforts and it helps retain the sense of community and solidarity that sustains unions over the long term. But it is also a vital channel for communication that the union may need to call on suddenly.
See digital tools as part of a broader strategy.
When resources are tight, it can be tempting to look for ways to replace time-intensive work in a cheaper and easier way. But we need to be sure we’re not using them in appropriate ways – complementing, rather than trying to replace, the hard work of organising.
Mass communications and mobilisation are valuable, but real power comes from organising, which needs deep, ongoing relationships.
Whether you’re using Action Network, Action Builder, WhatsApp, or a paper wall chart, the goal is the same – to build relationships, foster community, and turn that into collective power.
About Action Network
Action Network is a digital campaign platform, comprising campaign tools and campaign CRM. Launched in 2012 it provides a suite of tools for mass mobilisation, such as petitions, email actions and event management.
It holds data on all interactions and allows huge flexibility in segmenting and targeting communications through email or SMS. And it incorporates federated capability, to allow distributed organisations like unions to make use of it at many different levels.
Its structure as a cooperative, part-owned and governed by unions, ensures that the platform’s development is directly responsive to the movement’s needs, rather than external investors.
It’s been used by several unions in the UK, including Unite, Equity and NEU’s School Cuts campaign. The TUC integrate it with other tools to power the Megaphone campaign platform.
There is currently a project in development to improve the UK geographic and political localisation of Action Network, helping it work better for UK trade unions.
About Action Builder
Action Builder is a organising toolset, launched in 2019. It can either complement Action Network or stand alone.
While Action Network mobilises people at scale, Action Builder is designed for one-to-one relationship-building, tracking workplace conversations, mapping networks, and developing leaders.
The idea for a separate tool came from an understanding that conventional CRM type databases stored information on people, but couldn’t adequately understand or store data on relationships between people. Those relationships are the most vital units of organising, and it needed a reworking of the whole model in order to help organisers make use of that data.
Action Builder aims to provide intuitive and mobile-first tools for organisers and reps to complete their organising tasks with directly. As such it builds up the data directly as a product of the work, rather than needing people to input data retrospectively, which is where organising tools often fall down.
If you’re interested in learning more about Action Network, Action Builder, or options for similar tools, please get in touch with the TUC Digital Lab.
AI transparency: We used generative AI to make a first draft of this blog from an audio recording of Brian’s presentation to our event, which was then edited and expanded before publication.