TWELVE TIPS FOR TAKING THE
E-UNION TO THE NEXT LEVEL
Text of a presentation made in various forms to:
I have spoken and written elsewhere about how every aspect of trade union activity can benefit by better use of the Internet [click here]. In this presentation, I want to be very practical and very focussed, in suggesting twelve tips for taking the E-Union to the next level.
In preparing for this talk, I attempted a mini poll to establish how much use trade unionists are making of national union web sites. I was surprised at how suspicious people were of my queries, how poor was the available data, and how little we know about the use of these sites. Some people quoted the number of hits received, but hits is a meaningless measure, especially when one is regularly changing the design and content of a site, since each image constitutes a hit. Unique visitors is a much better measure, but it is important to know not just how many are visiting a site but also what they are looking at, what they are not looking at, and when this is happening in terms of hour of the day, day of the week, and week of the year.
So every web site should have a comprehensive and accessible tracking service with statistical data and graphical representations available in real time. To illustrate what this should involve and look like, you can check out the traffic data for this site [click here]. This information should be regularly monitored and analysed, not just by the web master or mistress but also by other senior officials, so that the union knows what is proving useful to members and what new information services need to be developed. Finally, it is a good discipline to have some realistic, but stretching, growth targets based on past experience. Annual growth in visitors of 40-50% seems to be a fair target.
When I access the Amazon web site [click here], the site welcomes me by name, makes recommendations for future purchases, and offers me a one-click option for buying and dispatching. The site knows who I am from a 'cookie'; it knows my interests from my previous purchases; and it has recorded my credit card details and address from my inputting gf this data on a secure network. This makes the experience of using the site so pleasurable and so convenient - if occasionally expensive! Trade union web sites should be moving in the same direction.
More and more unions are general unions representing a very wide diversity of members. Much of the information on the union web site is irrelevant to any particular individual and we cannot expect individual members to spend time and trouble searching for the most relevant and the most recent information of interest to them. Through the use of 'cookies' and a registration process, we can configure the web site, so that visitors are automatically directed to the information likely to be of most interest to a member of that gender, region, occupation, industry or company.
Many organisations struggle to add to their web site lots of up-to-date information on a continuous and regular basis. The main reason for this is that uploading of content is still seen as the sole responsibility of a web master or mistress who is expected to harass colleagues around the organisation for new material for the site. This model is typical of trade unions with a Communications Department dependent on negotiators and other officials for good stories or material.
The answer is to devolve the uploading of material to selected and trained individuals in each major department or unit, so that five, ten or fifteen colleagues are regularly filing material to the site. The use of cascading style sheets and a style manual, together with regular editorial meetings, will ensure that the site has a consistent style and 'feel' and that the Union is putting over a comprehensive and consistent set of messages.
Another way of ensuring that the content of the union's site is constantly changing is to create automatic feeds from relevant organisations which themselves have a very dynamic source of content. One example of this is the BBC newsline ticker service which is excellent.
However, a great source of trade union news from the UK and around the world is the LabourStart Labour Newswire [click here] which is updated automatically every 15 minutes throughout the day. Among the British unions using this service are NAPO [click here] and UNISON [click here], but every union web site should be taking this service.
Individuals wishing to join a union should be able to do so on-line through the union's web site. When I say join, I mean join - I do not mean record an interest in joining or requesting a membership application which will eventually be sent out by 'snail mail'. One of the first unions to provide this option was the New South Wales Teachers' Federation in Australia [click here]. One of the UK unions that now provides this facility is Connect [click here].
Equally members of the union should be able to make payments on-line for publications, branded goods, conferences and courses. Our members are used to this facility for almost every other organisation with which they deal; unions should be no less advanced.
Very few trade union members now attend Branch meetings; even fewer attend union conferences. But members pay their subscriptions, they are still entitled to a voice, and they should be enabled both to express a view and to respond to the views of others.
One mechanism is to run discussions forums on the union web site. Such forums should be focused on a specific issue or question and should be time-limited. They should be moderated by a union official or a consultant or academic to which this role has been outsourced. The moderator should ensure that the discussion remains focused on the issue in question; periodically summarize where the debate stands, clarify things which seem to be confused and introduce aspects which have been neglected; and finally produce a report for the relevant individual or body at union head office. UNISON is a union which runs several moderated newsgroups [click here].
Other electronic means of increasing participation include on-line polls. One of several unions that has such a poll on its homepage is the Communication Workers Union [click here].
Every union should be striving to make its site the first and obvious port of call for its members when they go on the web. The starting point is to encourage members to make their union site the default page which comes up every time they log on to the web. Then the union needs to ensure that the site is a terrific jumping off point for members to search other parts of the web by providing lots and lots of links, both within the stories themselves and in special pages of links. UNISON is a union which provides lots of links on its site [click here].
At a minimum, there should be links to every Branch web site in the union, to the national site of every other union in the country, to the site of every government department, and to a wide range of sites of organisations relevant to the specific occupational interests of those members. Indeed, by linking to the Open Directory Project [click here] listing of UK union websites, one can connect with almost 500 useful sites.
Finally there should be a search engine to enable members to fund material anywhere on the web - the best is Google and UNISON [click here] is a union which provides it on its home page.
The Internet is an incredibly dynamic medium. New things are always coming along and unions should be willing to try them and see if they work for them. A feature which is currently 'hot' is blogging - the operation of a web log or blog. This is a personal on-line journal or diary which is usually set out in reverse chronological order - with the newest material at the top - and which points you to other related parts of the Internet through hyperlinks. Blogs use standard, freely available software [for a sample click here] and there are now many millions in existence.
I run both a personal weblog [click here] and a professional one [click here]. I am sure that trade union members would find the blog of their general secretary, national negotiator or executive member much more readable and interesting than having to wade through stodgy press releases or research briefs. The first two British officials to open a blog have been Billy Hayes, General Secretary of the Communication Workers [click here] Union, and Judy McKnight, the General Secretary of NAPO [click here]. Both post entires almost every day. Billy Hayes - whom I helped in setting up his blog - receives up to 300 visitors a day and ordinary members post comments on his blog.
In the Netherlands, the chair of the union AbvaKabo Edith Snoey has an excellent blog [click here].
Unions should not be content with members coming to the web site; they should be actively going to the members with information in electronic form. This requires building up a database of e-mail addresses - both work and home - for as many members as possible. This process cannot start soon enough - partly because it takes time and effort and partly because one never knows when a union will be in dispute with a particular employer and need to contact the relevant members in a speedy and cost-effective manner.
Connect [click here] - the union for professionals in communications - claims to have the e-mail addresses of some 80% of its members who are probably a more IT-savvy group than the members of most unions. Connect made very effective use of this information in their successful ballot to maintain a Political Fund. But many unions have addresses for only a small fraction of the membership and have not started any systematic process or campaign for increasing the number rapidly.
Of course, once a union has collated e-mail addresses for members, it needs to use them - to give members an incentive for providing the address and keeping it up-to-date, to give officers a cheap and speedy way to communicate timely information to members, and to ensure that the addresses remain valid and invalid addresses are cleared from the database. This is best done through the use of e-newsletters targeted at particular groups of members.
USDAW's web site enables members to sign up to a choice of six different e-mail lists [click here]. Connect now sends a branded e-mail every quarter to every member for which it has an e-mail address and at one time it even sent a reseach brief on communications developments every month to its officials and interested parties. The Austalian labour movement has a weekly on-line newsletter that has been running since 1999 and goes to trade union activists, journalists, politicians and others [click here].
Such e-newsletters can be brief by providing hyperlinks to more detailed information on each topic. Another great feature of such newsletters is that, by creating appropriate groups, one can target them very precisely to members of a particular age group or gender or in a particular company or workplace. Furthermore, simply by clicking on the reply button, members can provide personal feed-back, so real inter-activity becomes possible, although one has to beware of the danger of communication overload. Such lists can be as short or as long as you want - I do a weekly mailing to amost 900 colleagues worldwide - and one can provide an automatic facility to people wishing to join or leave the list.
The Communication Workers Union ran a great campaign called "Demand Broadband" [click here]. Indeed the CWU has even become a commercial supplier of broadband to its members [click here]. All unions should be publicising to their members the benefits of broadband and providing services which make best use of such fixed-rate, always-on, faster speeds.
Broadband makes it easier to provide and access sound clips and video clips of conference speeches or training sessions or demonstrations. Trade unions in countries like the USA, Canada, Australia and especially South Korea already make use of these technologies. For instance, the Canadian Auto Workers Union [click here] has had a regular weekly video news show online for several years now. It is no coincidence that it is in South Korea - with the greatest penetration of broadband in the world - that unions post regular video broadcasts on their web sites.
Mobile services have great potential to add to the communications repertoire of trade unions. These services are particularly popular with young people whom unions are trying hard to recruit. One union which already makes use of wireless devices connected to the Net is the Flight Attendants' Association of Australia [click here].
One can use text-messaging to advise people of Executive, Committee or Branch meetings or the availability of new material on the web site. One can use picture messaging to send the Communications Officer a shot of a march or demonstration or to send the Health & Safety Officer a picture of a workplace accident or unsafe work situation.
Once 3G phones become more widely available and cheaper, we will see colleagues having mini video conferences and members accessing the web site from a mobile rather than an PC.
There are endless other possibilities. For instance, one could provide a Wi-Fi facility at the head or regional office, the education centre or the conference, so that colleagues with lap tops can obtain fast and easy Internet access without wires or plugs.
ROGER DARLINGTON