I am Alex White, a progressive campaign strategist, writer, social marketer and policy activist.
Conservative crank Gerard Henderson wrote last year that unions “have nothing to fear from external competition”. Apart from demonstrating that he knows relatively little about the new Fair Work Act, which allows for inter-union disputes over membership coverage, the sentiment he expressed, that unions do not face “traditional”, market based competition, is one I’ve heard expressed [...]
Because unions are democratic organisations, accountable to members and with a leadership elected by members, as organisations they face considerable challenges in messaging. Add to this the fact that many unions have a diverse membership covering distinct and structurally different industries. It’s no wonder that many unions struggle to develop strong, consistent messaging. The key to [...]
Social media is a fast-expanding landscape. New sites and tools are popping up each week, and more and more people are using social network sites than ever. Social networking is now the most popular online activity and is growing in every country on earth. Over 1.2 billion people can now access social networks — that’s [...]
In the digital campaigning world, good content is very important. I’ve resisted writing about the Kony 2012 campaign, but it’s worth raising here to illustrate why content is so important. Invisible Children aimed to engaged 500,000 US college and high school students using their professionally developed thirty-minute documentary. Their runaway success was because they thought [...]
There’s a maxim in the union movement that I’ve heard (and repeated) that it’s five times more difficult and expensive to recruit a new member as it is to keep an existing one. Membership retention is the second side of the growth coin. Almost every Australian union that I’ve had dealings with do recruitment fairly [...]