Digital systems generate lots and lots of data. But digital change doesn’t just give trade unions more data. It changes how unions relate to information, insight and organisational memory.
Digital unionism means moving beyond seeing data as a by‑product of systems, and towards treating it as a shared organisational resource that supports judgement, learning and better decisions.
Continue reading Digital unionism means a deeper relationship with dataBrian 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.
Continue reading Building union power in the digital age: Lessons from Action Network’s Brian YoungBack 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
