TUC Digital Lab

Getting the best deals on tech for unions – lessons from negotiation and group-buying at the ACTU

Modern unions buy in so many different types of services. At the Australian union federation ACTU’s Union Innovation Hub we’ve looked across a huge range of them to try to save our unions money. In terms of digital tools, that’s included things like CRM, websites, survey tools, event tools, campaign tools, learning management systems, membership fee processing, you name it.

We do this predominantly through collective bargaining. That should hardly sound revolutionary to unions, but too often we preach it and train it, but we don’t do it ourselves. We buy the same thing many times over within the movement. Even within unions, we sometimes find each branch or region will purchase separately, as it’s not being co-ordinated.

Introducing cloud CRM platforms for unions

We asked unions last year about what they wanted in terms of shared activity around the CRM projects so many of us are going through. One of those things was more to demystify the market for platform CRM, and which products are out there.

Many of us have been using particular membership database products for a long while, and there’s a potential jump in terms of moving to a newer generation of cloud CRM tools. The market leaders in this space have many ways in which they differ from traditional membership databases, and in which they differ from each other. So there’s a lot to get our heads around as we do our research.

Change management to support union tech projects

Implementing a new CRM or other core tech project without paying attention to how you manage the change within the union is risky. At best you may end up missing out on key benefits, and at worst, fundamentally limiting the union’s ability to operate on the new tech.

A dedicated onboarding journey for young members – Nautilus International case study

At Nautilus International, we’ve been working on a digital engagement project to improve the on-boarding process for our cadet members.

Design principles for a new union CRM project

When we set up the TUC Digital Lab, the first thing we did was to work with unions to devise a set of 8 digital design principles to help inform our work. They’ve stood up pretty well over the years and been useful to us on many occasions in steering the choices we make in what we do.

The principles can be a useful lens to view projects through. And with so many unions currently embarking on CRM change projects, I thought it might be good to revisit them in the context of CRM change, to see how each one might inform a new project.

Preparing for major union campaigns online

The need for unions to mount and sustain large scale campaigns has grown in recent years. We’ve seen major national industrial disputes for many unions. Fundamental challenges such as government attempts to curtail the right to strike. And for those unions who are politically affiliated, an upcoming general election campaign.

Digital technologies increase our options in a major campaign. It’s more viable than ever before to reach out to members and potential supporters at scale, and to mobilise them in new ways.

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.

Making great social media videos – four quick formats that work

We’ve been expanding our use of social video at the TUC, to make the most of networks like TikTok and YouTube. These networks give us the possibility of reaching beyond the more politically engaged people that we regularly get to on Twitter. But for a video to land well with different audiences, we’ve had to tailor our approach a lot.

Here are a couple of things we’ve learned, and four distinct formats that we come back to over and again when we’re trying to generate popular video content.