Alex White » Blog

The Zero Moment of Truth for unions

Alex — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 09:04:02 +0000

Have you heard of the Zero Moment of Truth?

Perhaps you’ve heard of the First Moment of Truth (and the follow up, Second Moment of Truth)?

The Zero Moment of Truth is a marketing concept coined by Google, as an evolution of the “First Moment of Truth” which occurs “at the store when a shopper selects a product and the “Second Moment of Truth” occurs at home when the shopper experiences that product.”

Google argues that there is now a Zero Moment — “the decision-point after a stimulus leads a consumer to seek more information but before he arrives at the store — or in politics, before a voter solidifies his choice”.

For unions, the ZMOT is an increasing reality.

A study conducted by Google and market research firm Shoppers Sciences this spring found that the number of sources used by a person for the average purchase has doubled, from 5.2 to 10.4, and shoppers use each source almost twice as heavily as in the past. In politics, the Internet provides voters with vastly more resources to follow campaign developments and view candidate speeches, debates, interviews, and political analysis than ever before.

Whether members or potential members, working people turn to the Internet when they face a challenge or problem at work (the stimulus).

Can they easily find your union’s website? Is it easy for them to find the information they are looking for? Is there a clear call to action for them to connect with your union?

The answers to this question may have a powerful effect on the next step a potential member takes — or even an existing member — and whether they make contact with their union.

Unions could consider Google’s advice for political campaigns:

How are political campaigns winning the Zero Moment of Truth? By answering the questions voters are asking. They are defining themselves with ads alongside relevant Internet search results, asking supporters to share on social networking sites, and placing display ads next to relevant online news articles and blog posts. Campaigns that excel at winning the Zero Moment of Truth jump in and move quickly — optimizing, targeting, and measuring the return on their online advertising investment faster than with any other type of paid media.

Take the time to read Google’s e-book on the Zero Moment of Truth. Then download my e-book for Online Campaigning for Unions.

The most important campaigning article you didn’t read in 2010

Alex — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:19:55 +0000

Last year, Sasha Issenberg released an e-book, an excerpt from his upcoming book, called “Rick Perry and His Eggheads“. It details how Dave Carney, Perry’s campaign manager, invited four academics into his re-election campaign with a mandate to bring a scientific approach to an industry that normally runs on gut feelings and anecdotes.

But before he wrote this e-book, he write a detailed article for the New York Times, titled Nudge the Vote: How Behavioral Science is Remaking Politics.

If you are involved in running campaigns of any kind — political, union, progressive, environmental — then this article could be the most important article you can read this year:

The growing use of experimental methods — Heather Smith, president of Rock the Vote, calls them “prescription drug trials for democracy” — is convulsing a profession where hunches and instinct have long ruled. Already, experimental findings have upended a lot of folk wisdom about how votes are won. The most effective direct mail might not be the most eye-catching in the mailbox but the least conspicuous. It is better to have an anonymous, chatty volunteer remind voters it’s Election Day than a recorded message from Bill Clinton or Jay-Z. The most winnable voters may be soft supporters of the opposition, not the voters who polls say are undecided. (“Undecided” may just be another word for “unlikely to vote.”) …

The experimental movement in politics began a decade ago, when the Yale political scientists Alan Gerber and Donald Green conducted a study testing the relative effectiveness of basic political tools. As the 1998 elections approached, Gerber and Green partnered with the League of Women Voters to split 30,000 New Haven voters into four groups. Some received an oversize postcard encouraging them to vote, others the same message via a phone call or in-person visit. One control group received no contact whatsoever. After the election, Gerber and Green examined Connecticut records to see who actually voted. The in-person canvass yielded turnout 9.8 percent higher than for voters who were not contacted. Each piece of mail led to a turnout increase of only 0.6 percent. Telephone calls, Gerber and Green concluded, had no effect at all.

This scientific approach applies behavioural science, organisational behavior and psychology disciplines to election campaigns.

What can unions and progressive organisations learn from this? (And note: many unions in the USA, like the AFL-CIO, are already adopting these methods.)

Firstly: Don’t rely on the above anecdotes that direct mail and telephone calls “don’t work”. This whole approach is data-driven — based on split tests and control groups.

Secondly: Challenge preconceptions. Just because your union or organisation has always done direct mail or calls, doesn’t mean they do work. Test your assumptions and try something new. For information on how to actually run a test in a live environment during a real campaign, check out Doug McKenzie-Mohr’s book on Community Based Social Marketing (available for free).

Thirdly: More broadly, the progressive side of politics should take the science of campaigning more seriously in Australia. In America, millions are being invested on both sides, while in Australia there is very little research being done in this area — and almost all of it at universities, unconnected to practitioners. (Am I wrong? I know Make Believe took a more rigourous approach to the Greens Party Melbourne campaign, but this hasn’t carried on now Bandt has been elected; and perhaps there is someone in the ALP National Secretariat who is on to this, but I haven’t seen any evidence of this.)

Lots of campaigners and organisations have a problem known as path dependency. Decisions about what we do now are powerfully shaped by what we have done before. Hopefully, this article, Issenberg’s e-book and the various other blog posts like this one help shake you off your predictable path.

Pokies rout a call for grassroots action

Alex — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:13:37 +0000

Troy Bramston, former staffer for Prime Minister Rudd and author of Looking of the Light on the Hill, makes some salient points on the disappointing poker machine reforms:

That the ALP is unable to successfully advocate its policies or has the organisational capacity to campaign for them is causing concern in the party.

In an interview for this column, Bruce Hawker, one of the ALP’s most seasoned campaigners, said, “If you are going to take on a very powerful or a very wealthy opponent — like the clubs, the miners or the banks — then be prepared to have a fight because they will be prepared to use their dollars to get the outcome that they want.

“The problem for federal Labor,” Hawker said, “is that they don’t know how to campaign on issues any more. When they got a bit of heat over the poker-machine reforms, they had to backtrack, because they couldn’t win the argument for it.”

The pokie reform backdown is a terrible policy outcome, disastrous on a human scale, as well as having profound economic consequences for families, the community and the wider economy:

Speaking after the Prime Minister’s announcement of the compromise position on poker machine reform National Director of UnitingCare Australia, Lin Hatfield Dodds, said: “Problem gambling will continue to cause untold damage to the lives of people struggling with pokie addiction, with huge knock on impacts for their families and communities.”

“If the legislation outlined by the Prime Minister passes through Parliament we will have national legislation regulating pokies for the first time. This is a significant step in the right direction.

“The pokie industry profits from those most vulnerable in our community, relying on an immoral business model where 40% of the multi-billion dollar profits comes from less than 100,000 problem gamblers.

“The pokie industry and those who support it have thrown a lot of money at slowing down real reform. They may have saved their profits but not their standing in our community

“While we will not get the reform needed in this Parliamentary term, the pokie industry needs to be on notice that we will get there in the end. The human cost of the obscene pokies profit is just too high.

“Everyone is now on record agreeing that pokie reforms must be evidence based. Most of us, including the Productivity Commission, believe that the evidence for mandatory precommitment is already there and is unequivocal.

Like the mining tax, carbon pollution reduction scheme, and most other major reforms, this reform campaign was atrociously handled by the Prime Minister’s office and the cash-strapped ALP national secretariat:

And therein lies the rub. In addition to not being able to successfully advocate its policies, the ALP no longer has the membership, the local network or the capacity to organise at a grassroots level to campaign for its policies or to fight those who oppose them.

No other progressive group was able to mobilise community support for the poker-machine reforms. As usual, GetUp! only came in when it was too late and was ineffective. Paid advertising — almost exclusively what GetUp! does — was useless.

Saddled with debt from the 2007 election campaign and struggling to raise funds for the next election, the ALP is also strapped for cash.

Clubs, hotels and gaming interests were threatening a $40 million campaign in marginal seats. The money would fund television, radio and newspaper advertising. Unflattering life-size cardboard cut-outs of MPs would be positioned at the entrance to clubs.

Understandably, MPs beat a path to the Prime Minister’s office to get the reforms scuttled. While most independent MPs were not going to support the reforms, several government MPs were likely to cross the floor to vote against it or, more likely, abstain from voting.

Troy Bramston, in his book, advocates a revitalisation of the ALP focused on building grassroots campaigning capacity — in the mould of the US Democratic party, Organising for America and the various pro-Democratic organisations like Van Jones’ Rebuild the Dream group.

Unfortunately, while both the US progressives and conservatives are spending millions of dollars on activist training and leadership development (e.g. the right-wing American Majority and Leadership Institute or progressive Wellstone Action), there is almost no sign of this happening in Australia. Aside from Campaign Action (which is under-resourced) and the ACTU Education Centre, there is really no well-resourced group committed to activist training and leadership development.

If Labor wants to win any potential conflict with future special-interest groups that aren’t widely thought of as heinous (like Big Tobacco), then it needs to take activist and leadership development seriously — and not just ALP members but fellow travellers and progressives in general.

Can we please bust the myth of shareholders as company “owners”?

Alex — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 08:02:23 +0000

Over in the UK, David Cameron is trying a bit of populism by calling for outrageous and excessive CEO salaries to be tightened. He proposes to do so by allowing shareholders to “binding” vote on CEO bonuses:

David Cameron confirmed the move and said he was determined to end the “merry-go-round” of super-rich bosses rubber-stamping each others’ inflated deals and being rewarded for failure: “Let’s empower the shareholders by having a straight, shareholder vote on top pay packages,” he said. “The market for top people isn’t working; it needs to be sorted out.”

In Australia, we have a “two strikes” system, where if a company’s AGM rejects a CEO’s salary two years in a row, there is an automatic spill of the board.

With CEO and senior executive salaries at many companies, especially investment banks like Macquarie in Australia or Goldman Sachs in the US, at grotesquely high levels, it is clear that something needs to be done. Even more galling, there is no relationship between a CEO’s pay packet and the performance of a company. It is clear that many corporate CEOs are enriching themselves by gouging out money from the company, often with the complicity of the board who approves extraordinary remuneration contracts.

Of course, Australia’s two-strike system and Cameron’s “binding” shareholder vote proposal ignore the reality of modern shareholding: most shareholders are short-term owners of stock, and most of them are institutional shareholders, foreign investors and speculators.

The majority of shareholders (over 85%) are corporate shareholders: banks, hedge funds, pension funds, insurance companies and financial institutions. Only around 10% of shareholders are individuals. This means that they have little personal interest in the internal activities of the company.

Furthermore, this attitude is exacerbated by the dramatic decrease in the average holding time of a shareholder. The average shareholding periods have decreased from five years to as little as seven months (three months for banks).

Think about the ramifications of this. Most shareholders of a company (over 85%) have no personal stake in the company, and hold the stock for only around seven months. It is unlikely that such shareholders have much interest or long-term commitment to governance or internal corporate issues of the company.

This is precisely why CEOs and senior executives have gotten away with it for so long.

Shareholders no longer act as owners of companies. The CEOs and executives have mostly carte blanche to do as they wish, gouge as much money as they can convince the board to give them, and then more to another company. (Average CEO tenure is also at record lows.)

A case in point is the despicable behaviour of Alan Joyce and the Qantas board in trashing this once proud Australian company. They have lost millions of dollars in value through the deliberate destruction of Qantas’ good will, running down assets. There is no real incentive for Joyce or the Qantas board to build a decent, sustainable company over the long-term, that serves the interests of the community, employees and consumers (and, I suppose, shareholders). Instead, they will continue to run down the company, lose market share and gouge massive pay packets, destroying the livelihoods of thousands of their employees and contractors.

Laws putting any kind of responsibility on shareholders to reign in excessive CEO salaries will simply result in more of the same.

The people with the greatest long-term interest in the well-being of a company are not the CEO and executive team, or the shareholders, but in fact, the workers.

The employees of a company most rely on its success and continued financial health and well-being. Their livelihoods depend on the company, more-so than any CEO, shareholder or board-member.

A company’s employees deserve at least a say on executive remuneration, and in my view, equal representation on remuneration boards that determine CEO or executive salaries.

As Prem Sikka writes:

As UK politics is drifting to the right, democratisation of corporations is unlikely. Shareholder empowerment is unlikely to solve the problem of excessive executive pay.

I’m in complete agreement.

Stephen Colbert, Super PACs and the US Presidential election

Alex — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:10:08 +0000

If you haven’t heard, Stephen Colbert, the “right-wing” counterpart to Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, recently announced that he was forming a presidential exploratory committee. He had earlier established a “Super PAC“, Making A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and he has handed over control of the Super PAC to Stewart to comply with laws forbidding collaboration between Super PACs and presidential committees.

Shortly after handing over control of the Super PAC to Stewart, it started to run ads against Mitt Romney, and calling for people to vote for Herman Cain.

There is now an interesting debate going on over at Politico’s Arena about whether Colbert’s activities are healthy or toxic to the American political process.

Here are some of the interesting quotes from the discussion:

Stephen Colbert might be funny, but his exploratory campaign is no joke. The point he’s been assiduously making on “The Colbert Report” is a smart bomb wrapped inside of an absurd conundrum. Simply put, there is no greater force for campaign finance these days than Colbert. By following the tortured laws and starting his own super PAC, Colbert has unleashed a prank that could embarrass the body politic into real change.

… But Colbert was twirling a lot of plates way up in the air when he discussed the lack of control he had over ads run by the super PAC he created called “Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow.” Based on legal advice from a former FEC chairman who’s become a frequent guest on his late-night show, Colbert recently turned over control of the PAC to “The Daily Show’s” Jon Stewart. No sooner did they stage a ceremonial transfer of control than the PAC was on the air in South Carolina with an ad asking that if Mitt Romney believed corporations were people, and Bain Capital shut down some corporations, then did that make Romney a serial killer?

When Stephanopoulos pressed Colbert on the claim, the comedian exposed the self-serving loophole. “I don’t want any untrue ads on the air that could in any way be traced to me,” said Colbert, but not before trotting out the old nag, “I don’t know if Mitt Romney is a serial killer. That’s a question he’s going to have to answer.”

To ask people to vote for someone who is not even a candidate could hurt either party. The matter of running this country, keeping us safe, working to create jobs, healthcare, etc. is no laughing matter. Colbert should use his celebrity for good, encouraging people to vote. In short, he’s a jokester and should stick with that, he’s good at it. Running the country? I’m going to leave that up to our president, and whoever America decides should have the job for the next four years.

Considering there are people in countries like Afghanistan that risk their lives to vote, we should consider it both a privilege and an obligation; something men and women for years have fought and given our lives for we to have the freedom to do. Shame on Colbert; he might be funny, but I’m not laughing.

Stephen Colbert may be the only candidate willing to be honest about why he and his fellow Republicans are running for president: to protect corporations, not people. And that agenda is no joke.

The corrosive nature of corporate donations to Super PACs and presidential campaigns, exacerbated by the Citizens United case, is far more dangerous to the democratic process.

In my view, Colbert is doing democracy a service, demonstrating the corrupted nature of the US political system.

UPDATE:

The Christian Science Monitor explains the paper-thin line between coordination (illegal) and talking via the media (legal):

The point they’re making is that the line here is tissue-thin. The law says candidates cannot “coordinate” with super PACs. That means they cannot request, assent to, or suggest any super PAC activities.

But there is a loophole, or, as Colbert called it, a “loop-chasm.” A candidate can talk to his associated super PAC via the media. And the super PAC can listen, like everybody else.

“I can’t tell you [what to do]. But I can tell everyone through television,” said Colbert on Stewart’sComedy Central Show. “And if you happen to be watching, I can’t prevent that.”

Stewart then played a clip of Newt Gingrich calling on his super PAC to scrub ads attacking Mitt Romney for possible inaccuracies.

Stewart and Colbert then talked to elections lawyer Trevor Potter – who is the attorney for both Colbert’s exploratory committee and the super PAC – through the same phone. Stewart said he’d bought air time in South Carolina, and so on, and Colbert just said he couldn’t coordinate, but smiled or frowned, depending on which city the ad time was in. Columbia, no. Charleston, yes!

Is this all legal, or are these comedians pushing the legal envelope and in fact risking jail time?

Nope, amazing as it sounds, they’re doing everything right. Election law expert Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California-Irvine, on his blog linked to clips from the show, and posted but one additional word: “hilarious.”

Collective Bargaining Facts: a new AFL-CIO website

Alex — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 23:54:12 +0000

The AFL-CIO is increasingly demonstrating that it “gets” online campaigning, with the launch this year of its Collective Bargaining Facts website. Designed by New Signature, and winner of a IMA Outstanding Achievement Award, this website ticks many of the boxes.

Where CBF shines

Professional design: a good, professional design is essential these days, and unions that invest in websites with substandard design are doing themselves and their members a disservice. In this case, the AFL-CIO have contracted New Signature, a professional design agency who were responsible for the I Am Not Your ATM site.
Interactive elements (including video): In this case, the primary goal of the website is education and information rather than action, and the design of the site makes the key interactive information elements (the videos) prominent.
Engaging and humourous: While not everyone will be taken with the rehashed “comedy” in the satirical videos, they are professionally made and acted, and credit should be given for the AFL-CIO steering away from dull talking heads droning on about collective bargaining. Other videos on the site also feature interviews and stories about real workers and their experience with collective bargaining.
Open source: The entire site is built using WordPress. This demonstrates the flexibility of WordPress, ensures that the site is easy for the AFL-CIO to update and keep secure, and suggests that the site was relatively inexpensive to set up.

The CBF site also includes social elements, such as the tweet and Facebook share buttons, that allow for easy social sharing. These are not prominent but included “as a matter of course”. I would have liked to see a Facebook landing page included in this, even if it was connected to the ALF-CIO Facebook page.

It’s also worth noting that the entire site is just one page — all the links and other content leads to the AFL-CIO main site, or to other websites (like news sites).

When news leaves us less informed

Alex — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:25:28 +0000

In November this year, Fairleigh Dickenson University came out with a study that suggests that some news sources make us less likely to know what’s going on in the world:

The conclusion: Sunday morning news shows do the most to help people learn about current events, while some outlets, especially Fox News, lead people to be even less informed than those who say they don’t watch any news at all…

Exposure to Sunday morning news shows helps respondents on this question: seeing these programs leads to an 11-point increase in the likelihood of getting the answer right. Listening to NPR also helps, but the biggest aid to answering correctly is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which leads to a 6-point decrease in identifying the protestors as Republicans, and a 12-point increase in the likelihood of giving the correct answer.

While progressives may laugh and consider this to be hardly news at all, it’s worth considering the implications for this research.

What is interesting for me is how many people knew what was going on (i.e. were able to answer the questions correctly) without consuming any news at all.

To me, this suggests several things, including the role of social media in spreading news (for example, about Egypt or the Occupy movement) and the importance of word-of-mouth. While reading the New York Times, watching MSNBC or listening to NPR makes you more informed, it suggests a base level of awareness that is reasonably high.

It also suggests that we absorb news from a range of sources — headlines, snippets from conversation, and so on.

For more about the social nature of news, read my post: Using social media to communicate visually to voters.

No related posts.

End of Year blogging and tweeting: how I went in 2011

Alex — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 22:24:22 +0000

Last year I wrote a post about how I’d gone with my blogging and tweeting. Given that I’ve been blogging here since 2008 and elsewhere since 2004, I thought I’d share a few insights as someone who operates a very, very niche blog about union campaigning and politics.

Blog

This graph shows monthly readership (each bar represents a month, the first is January and so on). As you can see, I’ve had a topsy turvy year. This is largely due to inconsistent blogging, and the very low month in September represents when I turned off the blog while electioneering. The low December reflects the fact that we’re only half way through this month.

So, what are the top posts for 2011?In order, they are:

These posts reflect only and new content. My Social Media for Unions e-book for example was released in December 2010, but continued to gain strong interest throughout most of this year. Similarly, What union members want from their union’s communications was written in February 2010 and Best practice use of Facebook for unions was from 2009, but were viewed many times each week this year. The high ranking of my book review The Whites of their Eyes by Jill Lepore gains number three ranking due to a few links at StumbleUpon.

Last year, a lot of my traffic came from the Federal Election. This year, most of my traffic seems to have come from long-tail search results. I also got a lot of traffic from my email newsletter, which has continued to grow (more on that later).

My top referrers are:

Google (organic search terms)
Email (my e-newsletter)
Direct (people writing in the URL directly)
Facebook
Twitter
StumbleUpon
Creative Unions

A few other interestings stats. People read an average of 3.7 pages when they visit and spend 2:31 minutes reading. 64.14% of my visitors are first-time visitors, and my bounce rate (the number of people who read just one page) is 3.37%.

Twitter

I can’t show you my entire 2011 Twitter growth, but I can do so for the last three months.

I started 2011 in January with about 510 followers and have grown now to 775, at a rate of about 1 subscriber a day. Again, I can’t pick a specific reason for growth, although I have been actively involved in several of the major Twitter hashtags of 2011, including the Qantas dispute and Occupy Melbourne. Looking around, I suspect that word-of-mouth and recommendations is very important — so when someone with lots more followers (in the thousands or tens of thousands) comments on what you’ve tweeted (or retweets you), you pick up followers.

My Klout has been a bit varied, which I think reflects periods of high activity and engagement, and periods of relative silence (September for example). Changes to the Klout algorithm is the cause of the large increase and fall in Klout.

Email

This year I have made an effort to continue my subscriber growth from the explosive growth from December 2010. The large growth has principally been in January through the release of my Social Media for Unions e-book, which required subscribing to my list to download. Since then, most of the growth has come from people wanting to download one or more of my three e-books. About 37 people subscribe each month, and 3 unsubscribe, so that’s a good growth rate. I’m now sitting just under 1000 subscribers, which for a niche blog about union campaigning and politics, is not too bad. My subscribers are also fairly diverse, with most coming from the USA, Australia, Canada and the UK (in that order).

2011 in a wrap

Last year, I said “content is key”. This year, I’d have to say “add value”. The e-books that I’ve written have been a key source of interest for my readers, subscribers and followers. I’ve focused on trying to provide useful resources that fill gaps for union communicators, focusing on social media, email and online campaigning. I’ve tried to highlight interesting research and promote best practice digital and social media communication techniques for unions. Moreso than 2010, this year has been about trying to provide that assistance to the union movement.

Case study: Union website redeveloped using WordPress

Alex — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 11:08:09 +0000

I recently stumbled across the website of Illinois Education Association (Regions 14 & 62) which I think is an excellent example of a union using an inexpensive Premium WordPress Theme to create a professional, feature rich website.

It’s worth highlighting this website to give union communicators and officials an example of what can be achieved using WordPress, a free, open-source content management system, combined with an off-the-shelf professional template.

As you can see, the site has a nice, modern professional appearance. It includes a scrolling carousel for featured content, and further down, there are social media links, a way to sign up to the union’s email updates, and an event calendar. What’s more, because it is built using WordPress, and the theme has been developed by a professional design firm (Studio Press), it will continue to get security updates for the foreseeable future (and Studio Press also provides ongoing, free support). It also comes with built-in search engine optimisation (from WordPress, and the theme), which is an important feature.

If I were to make any recommendations for improvement, it would be: get a custom favicon, and include an online joining page. I also hope that the email subscription uses MailChimp or another professional email marketing service, and that they have Google Analytics installed.

On the right, you can see the screenshot of the original, generic theme (and here’s the link to where you can buy it). Clearly, the IEA haven’t customised the theme much, but let’s be honest: they don’t need to. The default theme looks nice and professional — so all the union needed to do was add their own content and plonk on their logo.

Choosing to go the WordPress road is good for a lot of things, but isn’t necessarily the answer for every union website.

WordPress is excellent for getting up professional websites that are inexpensive and fast. WordPress can be deployed in just a few days or a weeks (depending on how much content is needed). It is very flexible, and in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, it will look great and have a lot of useful features. New content can be easily added, including pages, blogs, and with proper plugins, events and more. Many of the “features” spruiked by design agencies and in-house CMSs come standard with WordPress, like drop down menus, customisable URLs/permalinks, blogs, page templates, comments and threaded comments, built-in SEO, built-in RSS feeds, and so on.

However, it does have limitations. For very complex websites, or unions with a desire to integrate their membership database with their website, WordPress may not be the best solution. Most of the reasons that you wouldn’t choose WordPress are technical ones relating to your specific needs or existing infrastructure. Other reasons include the federated/local/branch nature of unions, creating expansive hierarchies of editors and users (for example, layers of editorial control across state, national and local levels, etc), something that WordPress doesn’t handle very well out of the box.

Your choice of CMS for union website should be based on the goals of the website, and your union’s budget.

Repost: Farewell from Creative Unions

Alex — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 22:47:46 +0000

Reposted from Creative Unions

It was in 2009 that we founded Creative Unions, a new effort to raise the bar for trade union campaigning, design and communications. Our manifesto was “success doesn’t happen by accident, it happens by design” and we set about trying to find world-class examples of union campaigns.

Now, three years later, it’s time to end our experiment. We have both spent a life-time in the union movement, working for several different unions. Now, we are leaving the movement to pursue opportunities in other sectors.

We believed that unions, as the world’s greatest, most transformative social movement, were slow in taking up many of the new tools, techniques and standards that the rest of the non-profit sector were adopting. Across the globe, unions were facing pressure on membership numbers, conditions and members’ rights. We saw four areas that unions could improve:

1. Effective campaigning. Although unions were the birthplace of social campaigning, many unions were stuck using old, outdated techniques, or were largely responsive and ad hoc. We argued that union campaigns should be planned, research-driven and have clear goals.

2. Social media. Before the Arab Spring, we argued that social media was a potentially transformative communications medium that would allow unions to re-engage with members in a highly personal, meaningful way. We argued that ownership of unions’ social media must be given to members, and that unions should adopt best-practice.

3. Good writing. Unions once used powerful language and words that mobilised thousands and tens of thousands. Good copywriting would help remove jargon and insider-language that was now a hallmark of union writing. Our goal was for simple, clear and concise language, written with the audience in mind.

4. Graphic design. The connection between good communication and good design is clear, and a hundred years ago, unions were once at the forefront of graphic design. Today, many of the brochures, newsletters, posters and other material that unions produce is amateurish. Poor design standards do great disservice to unions, and we argued for unions to recognise the importance of design as a specialist skill in its own right, not something organisers or media officers should do in their spare time.

As we reflect on our successes and failures, and prepare to leave the union movement, we thought we’d leave you with some thoughts on what we have learned.

1. Change is hard
We both underestimated the difficulty we faced in trying to change things. Both in our own union (the NTEU) and more broadly. Every day, we would face the challenge of people (organisers, union leaders, members, delegates) wanting to keep doing the same, comfortable (yet ineffective) things. We continued to see unions spend small fortunes on printing leaflets that were unreadable, or pursue losing campaigns with no goals, no measures, no research and no prospects. We continued to see unions set up social media accounts that then languished unattended or simply pushed out megaphone broadcasts. We continued to see newsletters, posters and websites filled with industrial jargon, written for insiders rather than for members.

Along the way, we did meet many inspiring comrades, in Australia and across the world, who shared our vision and beliefs. We are heartened that some people, some unions, have started along the road. We were encouraged to see the scores of amazing, powerful campaigns that unions are running in every corner of the world. Change may be hard, but it’s happening.

2. Forge our own path and don’t be afraid to fail
When we started Creative Unions, we didn’t really know what we were doing. We knew we wanted to develop and improve design and communication standards, and that we wanted to look internationally. One of the early mistakes we made was overestimating how much people wanted to interact with this. While the positive support is overwhelming (we have over 1000 Facebook fans and Twitter followers), we found that people were more interested in watching and listening, than talking back. Similarly, our attempts to foster a broader community of union designers ran into the problem that both of us were working full time on our own union’s campaigns – there simply wasn’t time.

We tried a lot of different things. Some worked, some didn’t. Our Creative Unions pads were very popular, but also very expensive (and we financed Creative Unions almost entirely out of our own pockets). The few events we held were time-consuming and less successful than we’d hoped. Each success and failure was a valuable lesson, and we certainly weren’t afraid to say “this didn’t work”.

3. There’s power in a union
Although both of us are leaving the movement as paid officials, we remain proud unionists and union members. The best thing of the last three years has been that Creative Unions has helped us see campaigns and union work that is, simply, incredible. We are both deeply honoured to have been able to promote the work of hundreds of unions to hundreds of other unions.

There is always the risk in unions of being too focused on our own work, our own members and the daily or weekly crises that occupy us. But the union movement’s strength is in our solidarity – the fact that we are an international movement that spans borders, race, gender and language. The breathtaking campaigns we saw came from every continent on earth, from every sector conceivable.

We are, and will remain, incredibly privileged to work for the members of our union. The work we have done with Creative Unions challenged us, depressed us, infuriated us, and inspired us.

In solidarity
Atosha McCaw and Alex White.

Social media and political news reporting

Alex — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 22:35:43 +0000

If you haven’t heard about Mitt Romney’s $10,000 bet, chances are you weren’t on Twitter during the Iowa GOP Candidates Debate on 10 December and the days following.

Mitt’s bet is a good example of how social media is changing political news reporting. Since the dawn of time, political reports have listened hard for good (“gotcha”) quotes and sound bites that sum up a debate, announcement or interview. Now, social media is changing the way journalists pick their sound bites, by amplifying certain quotes and giving journalists a real-time gauge of public sentiment.

Tweet via @blakehounshell - managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine.

Within minutes of the fated bet, Twitter started buzzing. While analysts mostly ignored it, the social media response was strong. The Twitter hashtag #What10kbuys was added alongside a lot of the #IowaDebate and #GOPDebate posts. Eventually, it started trending in its own right.

Social media amplifies

The Mitt Romney #What10kbuys debacle shows that social media can amplify your message to all corners. A few years ago, Romney’s comment would have gone reported in a nfew newspapers, for a single day. The social media reaction to Romney has shown that what you say as a candidate will get widely promoted — and most of it is outside your control.

The amplification is not what you say about your campaign, it’s what everyone else is saying. It allows an undercurrent of sentiment to become mainstream — like the strong response that was appalled by the cavalier way that Romeny made a $10,000 bet as though it were a dollar-bet.

Another good example is the video of Rick Perry appearing to be drunk at while giving a speech. This video went viral, although the speech and event itself was fairly minor and uninteresting.

Social media scrutinises

After the debate, the Democrats tweeted:

DNC: We want to know #what10Kbuys for you and your family. #IowaDebate

This helped not only to spread Romney’s comments further, but helped ensure that even people who weren’t watching the debate or following the GOP primaries have heard of it. What’s more, Romney’s defenders on Twitter have kept the hashtag going by trying to use it to attack Obama and the Democrats — leaving confused people days later to try to find out what it is all about.

Lessons for union recruitment: brand choice research

Alex — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 22:11:23 +0000

Some very interesting research by the GfK Roper Group into what reasons were important when deciding to buy a brand may be of some use for unions thinking about recruitment.

The research (from 1992) looked at the reasons that people bought brands, and according to the report, “knowing what to expect from a product because of past experience was the most common reason for buying a particular brand.”

Roper Report - Consumer Reasons for Brand Choice (1992)

The next strongest associations are likely to be formed on the basis of word-of-mouth (friends, family, colleagues, etc) or other non-commercial sources of information (consumer groups, media, etc). The report notes that word of mouth is likely to be particularly important for service organisations. “Company-influenced sources of information such as advertising are often likely to create the weakest associations and thus may be the most easily changed.”

What does this mean for unions?

Brand associations are critical determinants of what information will be recalled by someone, and therefore affects their “brand decisions” — that is, their choices to buy a product or service, or join a union. The strength of an association depends on how the information is initially processed as it enters someone’s memory and where it is actually locarted as a result. There are two ways to build “brand association” — commonly known as encoding and storage.

Encoding is two things: the quantity of information a person receives and the quality of their processing that information. Simply, this means the more times a person is exposed to a brand, the more likely they are to recall it, and likewise, the more they focus their attention on a brand, the more likely they are to recall it (and vice versa, exposure when the person is distracted means they are less likely to recall the brand). Other factors like consistency and congruity come into play as well (for example, the ease at which new information can be integrated with existing perceptions, or the brand’s inherent simplicity or vividness).

Storage is affected by a range of things, like the presence of other brand information, exposure time and “retrieval cues” (when a brand name is on the tip of the tongue).

Simply put, the more a union symbol is present in the workplace, the more it is encoded — similarly, positive word of mouth from colleagues improves the quality of the encoding.

For unions there are two take-aways from this research:

1. Someone’s past experience with a union is likely to be the most important determinant of whether they will join a union. This means that unions should think carefully about non-member outreach, how non-members are treated and referred to, and how the union is generally perceived. For an organiser, it may mean that a non-member with a “bad union experience” may not be worth trying to join up, whereas former members (even from other unions) should be prime targets. For lead organisers and union communicators, it is worth remembering that non-member “experience” the union even when they are not members — and even this second-hand experience can be important.

More generally, it suggests that peak bodies like the ACTU or trades halls should try to keep a record of past-members that can be accessed by union growth-teams. Knowing that someone has previously been a union member from another sector may dramatically increase their likelihood of joining a new union. When someone resigns from a union, their name could be passed on to the ACTU register. Unions undertaking a recruitment drive could enter in names of prospects or non-member lists into the database and see who was previous a union member.

2. Building a union’s presence in the workplace is important in shaping experience and fostering word of mouth. I’ve written before about the power of social proof and endorsements. With a growing number of people in Australia (and the world) never having a direct experience of joining a union, unions must increasingly shape second-hand experience to build positive engagement with future members. Of course, the most powerful brand advocates for unions are existing members and delegates, who should be encouraged to display union signs and symbols to create social norms.

The final, less important, take-away is that media exposure and the attitudes of political leaders is much less important than union leaders and organisers often think it is. Although Howard and the News Ltd media demonised unions, what is more important is personal experience, word of mouth and things in the union’s own control (price, quality).

Addendum

What is obviously not covered in this research is the question of union brands themselves. Do unions have their own individual (“corporate”) brands? Is there just a single “Brand Union”? Do people see the difference between one union and another at a brand level?

The ACTU did a lot of work creating the campaign brand “Your Rights at Work” — but four years on from the defeat of the Howard Government, how many people outside of the union movement and politics remember the brand or the campaign? The ACTU unsuccessfully tried to create a “Australian Unions” meta-brand to sit across individual union brands. But without the money to spend on seriously creating brand equity, the project was never going to succeed.

For individual unions, the answer will influence how much a union may decide to try to create their own brand. Some unions may have very high brand recall — like the teachers union (AEU) or construction union (CFMEU). For those unions, high investment in branding exercises is probably appropriate. For smaller unions though… are the efforts of the broader movement likely to overwhelm their individual efforts? A topic for future research.