Our first design sprint

A key function for the TUC online is to signpost people to trade unions. Thousands use the unionfinder tool on TUC sites every month, but it is under-performing, with difficulties in giving people authoritative results, and a user journey that is losing some people along the way. We ran the TUC’s first design sprint around this issue, looking at the challenge of how people find the right union and how to make it easy for them to join it. Continue reading Our first design sprint

TUC digital healthcheck

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

What are the next 6 million union members going to look like?

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?

The campaign for online union balloting

Probably the defining issue for unions over the last year has been the government’s Trade Union Act. It’s a wide-ranging collection of restrictions on union’s rights and duties, that make it harder for unions to organise and represent their members, and that undermines British workers’ right to strike.

We’re proud of the concerted and unified campaign that unions and union members mounted against it during its long parliamentary passage. We managed to secure extensive concessions and defeats to some of its worst measures, cutting off harmful proposals that struck at unions’ finances and organisation.

But we also won an interesting positive change from the Government, one that they had tried their hardest to resist. They’ve now conceded an independent review into allowing unions to use online voting for strikes and statutory ballots. Continue reading The campaign for online union balloting