TUC Digital

Next year, millennials will make up more than 50% of the workforce. Those who entered work during the internet age are nearly all instinctively digital-first. They’re also mobile, connected throughout the day, from wherever they are.

From Netflix to Monzo, people expect the convenience of digital services – always available, transparent, flexible, and with them in control. Those rising expectations can be hard for established organisations like unions to meet.

As we enter a likely general election, many unions will be thinking how they can get their issues across more clearly online during such a high profile campaign moment.

On Wednesday 26th July at UCL we held our fourth TUC Digital Lab session, looking at the challenges and opportunities for unions in making greater use of digital in organising.

Alex Lloyd-Hunter of digital agency Forward Action was one of the judges in this year’s TUC Communications Awards. And before the ceremony, he talked to a group of union communicators about his particular specialism – optimising results from digital engagement with supporters. Here’s a run through of some of the points he made that could be useful to unions.

At the end of June we convened the third session of the TUC Digital Lab, where we discussed and workshopped approaches to running successful ballots, with help from digital tools and design methods.

For the second TUC Digital Lab workshop, we brought together colleagues from 14 union organisations to help us identify good practice in union digital campaigning.

We’ve been doing some work at the TUC to improve our own social video output. The digital comms team got together recently to take stock of what we’ve learned and where we’ll go next, and we thought it could be useful to share more widely for other unions looking into their work in this area.

TUC digital comms experts Riz Hussain and Scott Gilfillan took part in this webinar on 15 May, to discuss how trade unionists can use features on social media to organise, network and campaign. You can watch it here: 

The first TUC Digital Lab workshop (Friday 26th April) focused on using digital channels to welcome new members to our unions. Colleagues from different roles across 14 unions came together for a three hour deep-dive into the issue.