Back around April 2022, our Senior Deputy General Secretary kicked off a big review of IT at CWU. It was a chance to look across the union at what we needed to do, including our core membership tools.
I thought the challenge of our old membership system contract coming to an end in 18 months could also be an opportunity to move to a more modern infrastructure that could better support innovation.
Continue reading Moving to Dynamics at CWU: a case study from discovery to deliveryDeploying new technology can often be challenging.
But deploying technology that will change organisations and how the people within them do their work is generally a lot more complicated than just the technology itself. As distributed organisations, with many stakeholders and complex democratic structures, unions have a lot to consider.
Continue reading Managing big tech changes in UK unionsWhat’s the most important page on a union website? I’d suggest it’s not the home page, or even the General Secretary’s biography, but the online joining form.
In many unions, a majority of members are now joining online. But too often the forms that they use to do so are letting us down.
Continue reading How can we make it easier to join trade unions?
Union joining forms are an important but often overlooked step in union organising. You need a process to get people into the union, check applicability in some cases, gather their contact data and set up appropriate payment routes.
Sometimes this means the forms get more complicated than they need to be. Having one guaranteed interaction with a new member means there’s a chance to gather lots of information that unions may or may not need in the future. However that can bloat forms and put people off from joining due to complexity or concern at sharing data. Continue reading User needs for union joining forms
