Alex White » communications

Communications survey for unions

Alex — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 03:55:32 +0000

In Australia, around 2 million working people are members of a union. Across the world, tens of millions more have joined their union. With the myriad public campaigns, collective bargaining, and workplace activity that unions engage in competing for attention from workers and the community, it is essential that unions effectively community and market their activities. We need to be able to cut through the noise and congestion.

This survey is aimed at understanding what kinds of marketing and communications activities take place within unions, what our strengths and weaknesses are, what our priorities are and where the gaps are. It is primarily aimed at communications and marketing, rather than the organising or industrial support work that unions undertake.

Although I’m in Australia and my experience with unions is Australian, I have tried to make this survey as “international” as possible.

This is an informal, non-scientific survey. I’m not building quotas and the questions are only as rigourous as I can make them.

Click here if you do not see the survey below.

The Qantas lockout and social media #fail

Alex — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:05:04 +0000

I was asked over the weekend to comment on the use of social media by Qantas, who on Saturday announced that they would lock out their workforce and ground their entire fleet. It is now clear that this was an attempt by CEO Alan Joyce and Chairman Leigh Clifford to bully their workforce during collective bargaining.

I made the observation that despite the lockout and grounding being premeditated and planned well in advance of the announcement, Qantas’ social media use was almost a text-book example of what not to do during a crisis.

Over at MarketingMag, Simon Dell has written an article arguing that:

A ‘social media strategist’ was quoted as saying that Qantas had dealt with this very badly in the social media space, just tweeting and responding to everything with broadcast tweets, rather than addressing specific issues. That, to me, is the mark of a social media strategist unable to understand the PR side of the situation. How was Qantas going to reply to the tens of thousands of tweets? How do they prioritise one over the other? Where’s the manpower to reply to them all?

They did what they had to do in moments like that: kept quiet. It was already a PR disaster. The Qantas board knew what it was going to mean when he made the decision. Having someone try and reply to tweets wasn’t going to fix anything. Best to just shut up, sit quietly and ride it out. Anything they said was going to make it worse.

So, if you’re interested, here are my views on Qantas and its use of social media during the lockout:

As a semi-regular flyer, my perception of the “damage” to Qantas is seen in terms of “reliability”. One of the main problems for Tiger for example was that it constantly (in the eyes of the traveling public) cancelled flights. The low cost was seen in terms of not actually arriving in the chosen destination.

The lockout of staff and grounding of the Qantas fleet by Alan Joyce means the “reliability” question for travellers is writ large.

A corollary to this is that during the actual grounding of the fleet, passengers and their families wanted information. The broadcast nature of the Qantas social media accounts (especially Twitter) meant 2 things.

The thousands of passengers and their families looking for information about their flights got no information (= Qantas is unreliable); and
The social media space was taken up by others, especially the unions, dissatisfied Qantas staff, angry passengers, frustrated families, annoyed taxi drivers and so on.

While the Qantas PR machine was in over-drive getting their key messages out to traditional media (especially television and newspaper journalists), they left the social media space almost entirely alone. Qantas certainly did not “keep quiet” as Dell suggests they did. They were out there briefing journalists and discussing strategy (it now appears) with senior Liberal Party politicians.

Crisis management 101 says you should not “shut up”. This lets others tell your story. You should be out there, taking command of the situation. Instead, Alan Joyce and Qantas management blamed external factors (union) for the crisis, rather than taking responsibility. A golden rule of crisis management is that “it is impossible to over-communicate during a crisis”. While Qantas did a fair job in briefing newspaper journalists, they definitely under-communicated online.

What could they have done? Overall, take a leaf from the book of the various banks who recently had their IT systems break down (resulting in no money transfers, broken ATMs, etc):

Replied to passengers with details of who they could contact for more information – the Qantas customer service phone line or an email address. If there were 1000s, its fairly easy to have a standard reply and to only respond to those asking for specific information about flights. The questions Dell asks about how to prioritise, etc, would be fairly standard social media customers service fair — just ask the banks.
Tweeted (or re-tweeted or live-tweeted) the various interviews and other lines that CEO Alan Joyce was giving to the traditional media (or at least linked to stories). In terms of the PR battle, they could also have re-tweeted supportive messages.
Given updates more than once every hour or two – especially for passengers “who come in late” to the grounding story. On Saturday they were down to one tweet an hour.
Put out their line on why the fleet was grounded (in the Fair Work Commission, they said under oath that it was over “safety concerns” due to stressed pilots).

Obviously, Qantas hasn’t invested in the social media infrastructure that some banks and other large corporations have (Vodafone is another good example of a corporation that provides “crisis” customers service using social media). However, given that the grounding was premediated and known well in advance by senior Qantas executives, I’d have thought that one of them would have pumped more resources into the PR/Comms dept before the grounding took effect.

In my view, Alan Joyce and the Qantas management mostly botched the job of communicating during the lockout. They left most of the public communications to third-parties like Tony Abbott, the Liberal Party and extreme corporate peak-bodies. They didn’t provide talking heads to the scores of 24 hour news shows.

Latika Bourke, an ABC journalist who covered the story extensively on Twitter, including the Fair Work hearings over the weekend, commented on Monday that many of her Twitter followers were Qantas passengers and staff, who were turning to her live-tweeting of the lockout and Fair Work hearings to get accurate information about what was going on. This is a gap that Qantas should have filled.

What’s more, they missed out on a prime opportunity to directly talk to their frustrated customers whose travel plans were disrupted. However, they now have the opportunity to follow up their disrupted passengers with all those cheap flight offers and discounts — using social media. Let’s see if they do.

Overall, I think Alan Joyce’s decision to lock out his workforce is despicable. With Qantas Chairman Leight Clifford having “form” in the deunionisation of Rio Tinto, it’s clear that this lockout and grounding is part of a strategy to deunionise Qantas and off-shore as many of its workers as possible to countries with poorer workplace rights than Australia.

I can only hope that Qantas remains a strong Australian airline, and that corporate grubs like Joyce and Clifford are hastily shown the door.

Fluency, fonts and union design

Alex — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 07:04:44 +0000

Have you heard of the concept of fluency?

Simply put (and for the purpose of this blog post), fluency is the “ease with which people process information”. Fluency affects a wide array of judgements people make about almost everything, and can influence our confidence in things, concepts, people or organisations.

It turns out that a lot of things can affect fluency – and the design choices we make, even for simple things like what fonts we choose can have significant impacts on a person’s ability to make a judgement about what they are viewing.

For unions – who have to compete each day for the attention of working people in a crowded space full of marketers, employers’ propaganda, magazines, TV, and more – understanding fluency is important.

Examples from experiments by Oppenheimer and Frank, in which lowered fluency was due to a font manipulation.

A research paper by Daniel Oppenheimer and Michael Frank (from Princeton and MIT respectively), A rose in any other font would not smell as sweet: Eﬀects of perceptual ﬂuency on categorization, suggests that font choice can have a significant impact on the fluency of a piece of communication. They did several experiments, where one piece of writing was clear and crisp (the baseline) and another where the same text was presented in a difficult to read font or was blurry, obscured or poorly photocopied.

They found that the fluency of the two pieces was different, and the readers’ judgements of the two pieces in the experiment was affected – by something as superficial as the font! What’s more, when illegible font or blurry photocopying was pointed out to experiement subjects as reasons for decreased fluency, the subjects attempted to disregard fluency as an influencing factor in their understanding of the information.

Oppenheimer and Frank’s conclusions:

Fluency can be increased by making the information easier to read (e.g. with a crisp font)
Fluency can be decreased by making the information harder to read (e.g. with a blurry or illegible font)
Audiences are not likely to consider influences on fluency (design, font choices, etc) as important – but they are!

This may seem common sense. Something that is hard to read is less easily processed.

But if you were to look at many of the posters, leaflets and websites of unions, you would see that this principle is regularly ignored.

I often see union flyers floating around that have little regard to the ease of reading. They jumble fonts in, or use inappropriate fonts (like grunge, smashed fonts, which are still popular in many unions), or crowd the message with lots of confusing images.

If unions are to make it easier for working people to understand our message – to make our communications more professionanal and effective – then we need to start to think more about fluency.

Simply put, good design matters – and an integral part of design is, believe it or not, font choices.

Read Oppenheimer and Frank’s research paper here.

Using social networks to communicate visually to voters

Alex — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 08:38:11 +0000

Memorable political visuals immediately tell a story and add context to headlines.

This article originally appeared on the Progressive Australia blog.

Tip: if you looked at the photo on this article before starting to read the text, then you’re like 90% of voters. If you’re not sure why this matters, you’re like most political commentators and pundits.

There is a large amount of research about how voters (and readers in general) consume media. But, by and large, we have not done enough as a political party to apply it to how we communicate to voters. This is especially true in these days of the “live web”, where grabbing the attention of potential supporters and voters is crucial.

What does all this mean?

We know from research (in Australia, the USA and UK) that visuals are a crucial connection point in how people consume information and experience politics. To some extent, the media professionals in Labor know this – which is why we avoid our Prime Ministers and Premiers being photographed walking alone, or being filmed near a door with an “exit” sign. Yet we still issue media releases and media kits that are pages and pages of text. Our party’s website is exceptionally text-heavy. Many of our MPs’ newsletters and information leaflets are crammed to the gills with text, and photos are often an afterthought.

Around 90% of people who consume media (especially the newspapers and websites) look at the visuals first: photos, graphs, infographics, displays, and headlines (etc).

Having a visual attached to an article (whether printed or online) makes it three times more likely that someone will read the text associated with the image.

Headlines are more likely to be read if they are accompanied by a photo.

The bigger the picture, the more likely readers are to read the headline.

With social networks like Facebook and Twitter focusing on the now, now, now – we can safely assume that most people’s attention spans aren’t getting longer!

All of this adds up to the sobering truth: voters experience politics at a cursory level at best. Their sense of politics and what Labor stands for is significantly derived from headlines and images that appear online and in print (and obviously, on television). For the average voter, it is the collection of headlines, photos, graphics, cartoons and graphics that accompany politically-themed news stories that give them impressions about politics.

The text – and the quotes – are literally the last thing that most people see. This is true, not just about politics (although it is especially true about politics) but most other areas. Text – the details, facts and key messages that we political tragics like to focus on – is consumed last. Which is not to say it is unimportant, just that it is not as important as we like to think.

The corollary of this is that the most “informed” voters are often actually the least informed. Research in the United States suggests that voters who consider themselves the most informed about politics actually perform worse than random chance when asked about the issues. Similarly, those with higher education (an undergraduate qualification or higher) were more likely to be misinformed about important issues than those with high-school qualifications or lower.

This is for similar reasons that most voters take only impressions from political communications (whether in newspapers, television or online) – they tend to consume information that reinforces existing biases and assimilate only those facts that confirm their existing beliefs.

What actually happens is that voters, especially partisan voters, rationalise decisions they’ve already made, rather than arriving at positions through consideration of facts.

How does this help us? Considering a significant public policy campaign that Labor is engaged in currently – the carbon price – there are a few things we can do.

Firstly, we shouldn’t rely on facts to “win” the “debate”. For those people who are interested, it is likely that they have already formed an opinion and are now cherry-picking the information that confirms their existing opinion of the carbon price. If they support it, they likely ignore contradictory evidence, and similarly, if they oppose it, they will be more likely to read political opinions that also oppose the carbon price.

Rather than relying facts and figures to communicate about policy or politics, we should talk far more about the “why”. There is a lot of research about political communication, and it shows that facts and figures doesn’t work in influencing people’s opinions. Providing context and explaining relevance in a concise, simple and consistent manner that speaks to our aspirations and ideals is more effective. (This is, of course, not to say we shouldn’t have fact-based policy making.)

Secondly, we should use visuals more to spread our communications. Think about those chain emails that get sent around the office – the ones with pictures of cute dogs and cats. The Youtube videos of surfing dogs or someone riding a motorbike with a BBQ strapped to their body. These are frivolous examples of effective communication – the visuals tell the story. And, importantly, they are consumed incredibly quickly.

Think about the most effective political ads and most of the time it is the visuals that are most powerful. The Reagan ad that portrayed the Soviet Union as a bear, or the Bush ad that portrayed terrorists as wolves stalking through a forest. Those ads were considered very influential in the outcomes of elections – yet they were only 30 seconds long!

Strong, powerful visuals that quickly tell a story are more likely to get a video or photo shared. They help people form impressions about complex issues.

With the rise of social media (Australia has the highest per capita use of Facebook for example, with the fastest growth demographics being the over 50s), progressive political organisations like Labor need to communicate more with images. The images we use should be customised to the issue – no stock-photos or file footage!

Thirdly, using social networking (online and in the flesh) helps us tap into what is known as the “power of weak ties”. The friend of a friend, a distant relative, an acquaintance – people with whom you do not have a deep personal relationship are still able to communicate with you freely, share their ideas and their views.

Because most voters are impressionistic, social networking can help form those impressions – and having a political view shared by someone the voter knows (even distantly) spreads those political views via social diffusion. Social diffusion is incredibly effective at sharing information. Think about a book, film or restaurant you have read, watched or visited recently. Chances are that your decision was in part influenced by a recommendation by someone you know. The recommendations of friends and acquaintances can influence our choice of suburb to live in, school to send our kids to, which doctor or dentist to go to – and how we think about politics.

Social media, like Twitter and Facebook, puts social diffusion and the power of weak ties on turbo speed. And we need content – engaging, visual, evocative and narrative – that can be shared through online and real-world social networks.

Top social media tips for unions – UNI Global Union Communications talk

Alex — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 12:59:19 +0000

These are my notes for the Skype presentation that I gave this evening to the UNI Global Union Communicator Conference. I was asked to talk about “top social media tips for unions”.

Top Social Media Tips for Unions

Basis of my views are the Creative Unions manifesto.

For too long, unions have been slow in taking up new techniques, new campaigning tools and improved standards. Creative Unions sees its role as promoting best practice for communications, campaigning and design – especially design. Atosha and I set up Creative Unions in 2009 to find international benchmarks in the union movement, not just in Australia. If you haven’t seen our site, check www.creativeunions.org.

Social media is an incredibly powerful tool for unions to reach a new audience and communicate with existing members. The rules of social media – conversation, participation, openness and community – fit well with union values. We must use this tool wisely to be effective.

At the NTEU, we face the same challenges that many unions face in adopting best practice for social media. I don’t claim to do everything perfectly. Facing and overcoming cultural barriers, inertia and making sure everyone understands and agrees with what we want to achieve with social media.

Most of my tips are principles that are general in nature. I have many more specific tips for unions to use social media and online campaigning on my blog.

My top tips

1. Social media is about conversation

Tools like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and a few others present excellent opportunities to engage members and potential members in conversations.

The days of one-way, broadcast communication from unions is over. If members and non-members can’t talk with you in the forums of your choice, they will talk about you in other forums.

The conversation is not just between you and the member. Two, three or even scores of people can be involved in a social-media conversation on Facebook or a blog. This can be the most important, powerful part of social media.

If you have a union Facebook or Twitter account, don’t just wait for members to leave comments or send you messages. You need to initiate conversations as well as respond.

2. Ownership and relationships

Social media helps people build attachment to brands – and unions should not be an exception. By being open and transparent, and living up to our values of “member-centric” organisations, smart unions should increase the commitment of members and reduce barriers for non-members to join.

We can no longer run closed systems where the Secretary approves everything. We need to empower our delegates and members by giving them a union voice in social media. We should encourage members and staff to blog, to tweet and to “brand” their social media presence with the union’s logo or campaign design.

3. Make your social media purpose driven

A big – and sometimes legitimate – criticism of non-profit social media is that it promotes slacktivism or clicktivism. As unionists we don’t want people to think that just by following us on Twitter or liking us on Facebook that our members activism is over.

Engaging with the union is the first step towards the member becoming more active.

Your social media plan should link with your broader communications and organising strategy. How does your social media link with your online campaigning? Your bulk-email campaigns? Your on-the-ground organising? Your media management and PR?

How can your union’s use of social media encourage people to become more active within the union? As organisers, we use commitments to develop activists. Social media can help build commitment because behaviour leads attitude. Facebook and Twitter engagement is a form of public, social commitment to a cause or activity.

Make sure that you have a plan beyond just “we need a Facebook page”. What do you want union members to actually do? What real world follow up do we have planned? Have we, as union communicators, sat down with organisers?

4. Track your progress, set goals

This links with the previous point – how do we know if what we are doing is working? Set your goals. How many followers, conversations, comments, clicks, likes do you want. We need to set these goals because most unions have scarce resources. Metrics and goals let you see how well your social media campaigns are working. Are people actually liking or sharing your content? Are people clicking on your Facebook links to your union’s campaign website?

5. Don’t forget the basics

Facebook and Twitter both provide free guides for non-profits to use their platforms. There are also great resources out there for non-profits. Just because it doesn’t say “union” doesn’t mean that we can’t use those techniques.

Caveats

There is no silver bullet

Just having a Facebook or Twitter account doesn’t make an online campaign. There are lots of other things that shouldn’t be neglected. For online campaigning, in my view bulk email is still the most important tool available for unions.

Don’t expect millions of followers overnight

It takes time to build trust, earn followers and get them engaged. Here’s a few ideas for getting more Facebook followers:

Ask your members to like your Page.
Make your content interesting and relevant so people will want to get it.
Reach out to like-minded groups and interact on their pages.
Promote your page on your website, emails, print media, etc.

It takes time and resources to do properly

It’s free to set up a social media account, but you need to devote resources to doing it properly. This takes the time of a union official or volunteer – to check comments, respond, engage and updates. Producing content takes time. Videos, photos and news. Tweeting your media releases won’t cut it.

There needs to be a purpose

Don’t turn your activists into clicktivists. Make sure that your social media presence has a purpose. How does it ensure that it achieves your union’s campaign and organising goals? Don’t do social media “just because”. Have a reason, set goals and measure your success.

Go where the members are (aka, why Facebook)

Most people use Facebook in the West – there are exceptions in different countries, such as South America, Russia and parts of Asia. But Facebook is the juggernaut, despite slowing growth. There is no point in insisting that your members only engage with their union on places like UnionBook. Most members and non-members use social media to interact with friends and family. The union needs to engage with members where they are, even if Facebook is a business and not union friendly. There are web services that can scan your membership list and tell you which social networks they are on – so use them.

Design is important – even in social media

All your union’s communications should be professionally designed – not just your website and print, but also social media. Your Twitter backgrounds and your Facebook page pictures should be professionally designed and consistent with your other online and off-line communications.

Everything is archived and public

Don’t assume that your social media activities are private – even if you’ve got privacy settings set up. Be aware that employers and other opponents will be scrutinising your online activities as well as everything your union does and says.

Whether it is a misinterpreted comment on your blog, or a “tweet” taken out of context, it is highly likely that something will go wrong.

The best way to handle these mishaps is, like all crisis management, to be honest, acknowledge the mistake, explain how you are remedying the problem, and move on. Ensure your response is timely – within 24 hours is a good benchmark. If possible, break the story on your own terms rather than wait to be called out on it.

Website References

www.creativeunions.org

www.alexwhite.org

www.mortartown.com

Five reasons why unions should care about email

Alex — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 11:15:47 +0000

Although email has been around for decades, it is still the cutting edge of campaigning and communication. Even in the age of social media, Twitter, Facebook, and iphone apps, email is by far the most used way that people use to send information – more than 94% of adults send or receive emails regularly, higher than everything else. Almost everyone who uses the Internet uses email.

Emails, unlike websites or social media, allow unions to send our message right into their inbox – and because of this it can feel more important and personal. We’re going right into their home, their study, their living room or study to have a conversation. Politicians and businesses have been using email for years – but don’t worry, email is more than ebay catalogues or media releases.

Email campaigning is amongst the safest, cheapest form of mass public relations and communication out there. It can be deeply personal, highly engaging, and spur the recipient into doing amazing things for your union campaign.

For all of these reasons, unions should treat email more seriously than just send out an all-member email using Outlook, Lotus Notes or Gmail. Unfortunately, too often I see unions cut and paste their email list into the BCC field of Microsoft Outlook, without a thought about how many people actually read the email. Worse still, I’ve seen union leaders assume that most, if not all, recipients of their email actually open the email and read it. Unfortunately nothing could be further from the truth.

So, why should unions care about email?

1. Email builds relationships

Emails that you send may be broadcast, but the recipient can email back. This dialog means that you can engage with your members and subscribers in a personal way. While engagement and relationship building is at the core of social media, email has done it for years. Well-written emails can convey enormous information about your union and your campaign – even if they don’t write back.

In my experience, email lets union members and supporters reply to broadcasts – and when you start talking back, you’re more deeply engaging with them than any other form of communication other than a face-to-face conversation.

If you’re doing email properly, with a permission based list, then in most cases, you’re in a good starting position as well – your email recipients want to hear what you’ve got to say.

2. Email is cheap

Email itself is free to send, but if you want to do email properly, you should use an email marketing service, like the excellent Mailchimp (or the service that I offer). While there are costs to sending good quality emails – staff time, design – it is far less expensive than direct mail.

3. Email lets you micro-target and segment

If you are using a good email campaign service, you should be able to vary the content of your email based on what you know about them. Where they live, their workplace, their age and gender, or whatever other information. The more personal you make your email content, the higher the likelihood that the recipient will open your email and take action.

4. Email give you instant feedback

Email statistics and analytics gives you detailed feedback on how well your email campaigns are faring. How many people are opening your email? How many forward it to a friend or colleague? How many unsubscribe? How many click on the link? Good email services should integrate with Google Analytics, so you can follow them from the email you send to your union’s campaign website.

5. Email is quick

Unlike printed flyers, newsletters or posters, emails can allow for rapid response. You could get an email campaign up and running, from conception, writing, design and sending in just a few hours. You can also decide to send the email at optimal times – good email services let you schedule when the email gets sent.

Note: These benefits are not necessarily exclusive to email – other social media tools offer some of these features as well.

Email tip for unions: don’t overload your members

Alex — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 09:59:09 +0000

Email is an excellent way to easily and cheaply communicate with your members. A good union email should always include some kind of call to action – an “ask” for the recipient to do something, whether forwarding the email, visiting a website, donating money or registering an event.

The best thing is that most union members not only accept emails from their union, they expect and value them. Similarly, for campaign-specific email lists that include non-members and people from the general community, there is an expectation of regular updates from the campaign.

However, a successful union email strategy relies on balance in many areas. Balance in trying the calls to action in your e-mails and balance in the amount of e-mails you send over a period of time.

Giving your email address to someone – or an organisation – is a large act of trust. Someone’s email address can be very private – especially their personal email address. We, as unionists, need to recognise and respect this fact. When they give us their email address, we need to ensure that the emails we send are relevant to them. People get hundreds of emails. If we’re not giving them compelling emails, why would they read emails we send them?

How can we solve this problem?

Well, let’s start with how many e-mails you send out.

If you are building an email list from your campaign websites using any mainstream autoresponder, you will have access to the statistics for sign-ups and unsubscribers. Keeping a watchful eye on your growth and ratio of unsubscribes you get is essential. The aim of any email campaigning effort is to stay present in your audience’s minds without overloading them with an e-mail every single day and simply annoying them.

There are no hard and fast rules for how many e-mails you can send in a week since it largely depends on your target audience and how you’ve built your list up to this point. For example, if you send an e-mail out every two days, each e-mail trying to get your list to do something or donate money, you are likely to have a lot of unsubscribers. Obviously, this is detrimental to your future success. In this case it may not be the volume of e-mails you’re sending out, but the fact that you’re trying too hard to get your subscribers to do something in every single e-mail. In my experience, more than one email in the same day is a definite no-no. Not only does open-rates dramatically drop, but unsubscribes also increase.

Not only that, writing an e-mail every day or two is very time-consuming, with not necessarily a return on that time. As a general rule of thumb, you should only send out emails for genuine news or important issues. More than twice a week can test your subscribers’ patience.

Most members and subscribers have expectations about the numbers of emails they receive from their union. Going outside of those bounds can violate the trust they’ve put in you. Consistency in sending emails is very important. If you send emails sporadically, you don’t build up rapport or trust with your members

When you do send out an email with an important call to action, it’s a good idea to let your members know exactly what the email is trying to do, tell them why it’s important, and why you think it will benefit them. This helps maintain a high level of trust from your members, and helps keep your action rate up.

How much is too much?

There are two ways to check whether you are sending too many emails. Your open rates and your unsubscribe rates. (You’re using an email service that can track these things, right?)

If you’re losing more than 1% of your email list each week through unsubscribes, then you’re definitely sending out to many emails. If you’re losing subscribers, then decrease the rate you send emails. Try sending “newsletter” style emails, that are made up of links to your union’s website or blog articles. These can replace individual update emails that you’ve previously been sending on a daily or twice-daily basis.

You may also notice that your email open-rates have dramatically dropped after sending a few emails over one or two days. Average open rates are – in my experience – between 15-25%, but I’ve seen them drop to less than 4% when three or four emails were sent to members over two days. People just get fatigued, and no matter how many times you put “urgent” in the subject line they aren’t going to open your email.

One of the best things you can do to really maximize your e-mail campaigning strategies is to give your members “valuable info”, meaningful calls to action, and a reason to return to your campaign or union website time and again. By doing this you are much more likely to have a higher response to your calls to action or increase your traffic to your website.

Getting email stats

I’ve seen to many times unions sending bulk emails to hundreds or even thousands of emails to their members using Microsoft Outlook. Using a program like Outlook or another bulk-email program denies you important information about whether your members open your emails or click on the links. It also makes it difficult to send emails that look good.

That’s why I’ve set up a boutique email campaign service for progressive causes, that provides all of this information, handles lists, and gives you amazing analytics. There are literally hundreds of email service providers like this – some of them of very high quality, like MailChimp or BSD Tools (which is very expensive). However, your union absolutely should use a service that provides statistics – and can handle unsubscribes (which can be required under Spam Laws).

Campaign Monitor has a fantastic resource for email campaigning. Check it out here.

Why the conservatives are wrong on the economy

Alex — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 22:11:44 +0000

UK Labour media master Alastair Campbell has an excellent post on his blog today about how the Tories consistently fail on strategy, even if they excel on tactics. He basically makes the point that even though the media is on their side, and they are able to get their line in the paper each day, their argument that Labour is to blame for the recession (rather than responsible for the recovery out of the global financial crisis).

Because Alastair’s blog is rather eccentric and doesn’t have a permalink to his articles (and it’s not currently in the Archive), I’ve reproduced the article below.

For the nth time, I will point out the difference between strategy and tactics and suggest that David Cameron and George Osborne are rather better at the latter than the former.

Watching Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and Peter Mandelson take apart the Tories’ National Insurance deception – glad to see they were calling a spade a spade – was a reminder of that esssential Tory weakness.

They assume that if they get a good media hit out of something, they have won the day. And they think if they win enough days in the media war, they will win with the public.

Yet even with the media heavily loaded in their favour, and even with the hit they enjoyed with their NICs rabbit the other day, and the roll-out of business support, it does not appear to have had the desired efffect. And it is interesting that is they who want to move the debate away from this particular issue, and Labour and the Lib Dems who want to keep a focus upon it.

I had all but forgotten about the James Report until GB mentioned it this morning. It brought back awful memories of the last campaign in 2005 when this heavy tome was unleashed upon us, identifying all sorts of areas where government could save money and so fund the promises being made by the Tories.

It took a while, but bit by bit we pulled it apart until its credibility was gone. The same is now happening to the four page memo on which DC and GO appear to be basing their entire economic ‘strategy.’

By happy coincidence, this morning’s press conference took place against the backdrop of an OECD report suggesting the UK was better placed than other countries to emerge from the recession strongly.

That sense of recovery, and the government’s role in it, is without doubt one of the reasons why the Tories are failing to pull away in the way they had hoped to by this stage of the campaign. But the inexperience and judgement of DC and GO are also factors, as is the sense many people have of their elitism and their lack of connection with most people’s lives.

One of the most efffective parts of this morning’s event was when Alistair Darling reminded people of the serial misjudgements Osborne and Cameron made at the time the global economic crisis struck. This latest misjudgement – a promise of a tax cut without real explanation as to its funding days after saying the deficit was priority number 1 – stands in a long line.

As GB mentioned a few times in PMQs exchanges in the last year or so, the Tories were wrong on the recession and wrong on the recovery. Tactics will only take you so far if your strategic response to the single most important event of the last Parliament, and the single most important issue for the next one, is wrong.

Now, without over-emphasising the similarity, in my view the Liberals have made exactly the same mistake. They are focusing on debt and interest rates, and slamming the Stimulus Package that saved Australia from the recession that the UK and the rest of the OECD is experiencing.

This is a strategic error for the same reasons that it’s an error for the Tories to focus on National Insurance. Australia has the best economy in the developed world with amazingly low levels of unemployment, and most Australians recognise this fact.

Abbott (and Turnbull and Nelson) has picked the wrong side of this economic argument.

Connected candidates: Beyond Twitter

Alex — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 21:13:44 +0000

Most political candidates are on Twitter and Facebook – using these social media tools to reach out to younger voters, and instantly communicate with supporters, the public and the media.

I’ve written previously about how political candidates can use social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook, Google Apps and how campaigns have made use of mobile technology like SMS and iphone apps.

Lisa Johnston, Democrat candidate for Kansas Senator has put her Foursquare profile on her web page.

Now, iphone-enabled Democratic candidate Patrick Kennedy is using new social media tool Foursquare to let voters know his location.

Foursquare is a free iphone app (available on Android phones also) that lets you update your friends about your location. It’s designed to help friends meet up if they are nearby, such as at a cafe or bar. It can link into Twitter as well.

It is a little “weird” that people can follow a candidate’s every move, Kennedy admits. But he said it makes him stay active. “If I say I am going to be out there representing people this holds me to account. I can’t hide with this tool.” Kennedy said he was recently contacted by someone who saw he had checked in down the road and wanted to know why the candidate did not stop by his group. A visit was quickly arranged.

This example shows the potential usefulness of Foursquare, as it focuses in on one of the applications of Twitter for candidates: letting local constituents and media know about your attendance at community events. Candidates could easily use Foursquare like Kennedy has: to link in with locals, and promote their activities. Opportunities to get local media also arise, as local journalists can link in to the candidate’s activities (sometimes the sheer fact that the candidate is using social media is newsworthy).

Key to this social media tool is the smart phone – an iphone, android phone or Blackberry. Political candidates and their key campaign staff should all have smart phones of some kind that can easily update a variety of social media sites – Twitter, Facebook and others like Foursquare. There should also be the ability to take photos and videos.

#NoCleanFeed campaign starts to focus messaging

Alex — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 11:26:01 +0000

The #NoCleanFeed movement is not an organised campaign, but rather a loose connection of disparate groups including ISPs and civil liberties organisations.

For a while, I’ve been arguing that the #NoCleanFeed campaign should drop the focus on censorship:

I suggest avoiding commenting on the refused classification – most Australians aren’t going to be sympathetic to an argument that wants to allow free access to Jihadist propaganda, fetish images or advice on euthanasia. The civil liberties line sounds a lot like “geeks are complaining about not being able to download freaky p-rn as fast”.

Instead they should talk about how the filter won’t actually catch, stop or prevent a single pedophile:

Real cyber safety: The filter won’t stop or catch a single pedophile, whereas the $44 million spent on the filter could hire up to 300 new Federal Police who will actively hunt down and stop child s-x offenders.

Today, in what I hope is not an April Fools Day joke, I read that Internode is now going on with the “real cyber safety” line.

But Mark Newton, an engineer with ISP internode, said: “Censorship will not catch a single pedophile, will not cause a single image to disappear from the internet, will not protect a single child.”

(My emphasis.)

This is a good step forward for the #NoCleanFeed campaign, and although they’ve used the “censorship” line, they’re pointing out the inherent flaw in the justification of the filter.

The #Nocleanfeed campaign, DoS and political nous

Alex — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 08:41:14 +0000

The #Nocleanfeed (aka, #OpenInternet) movement won’t succeed in blocking the Australian Government’s filter because its leadership are captured by the dead-end Democrats and fringe libertarians with little political campaigning experience. This capture means that unfortunately the movement is receiving ill-informed political counsel from serial Democrat losers like elitist apparent drug-taker Kathryn Crosby (links to screenshots now that Twitter is password protected) and Geordie Guy.

(Disclosure: I have had public disagreements with both Kathryn and Geordie over the campaign direction. Further disclosure: I am a member of the ALP. Final disclosure: I oppose the internet filter proposed by the Federal Government, and have written about it here.)

Why do I think the #Nocleanfeed campaign won’t succeed? Because they are obsessed with issues that actively marginalise them from the broard-based messaging and campaigning needed to succeed.

I think “comms_consult” summarised the problem quite well here:

From those on the side trying to stop the filter, you basically represent some territory educated net savvy twitter users. You’e lost parents worried about the amount of time their kids proficiently spend on the net. Conservative religious lobbies are making huge gains whipping up fear, online. You said the filter would slow down the net, but their trial said it wouldn’t. You went on telly and said it would be bad for free speech. If free speech means paedophilia, the government said, well we don’t want it. They’ve got this campaign by the balls. Besides, they’re giving you an NBN, which they think you’re ungrateful for.

The campaign against has largely focused internally, and hasn’t done much of anything to win over their opponents or expand the base. The Opposition and the Greens have publicly supported the against position, and yet there is nothing either can do - and it polls terribly.

Talking to yourself is not how you win campaigns.

The government’s argument is that the internet is a dangerous, unregulated place. It’s arguing that it is not unreasonable to regulate dangerous content online, as it is in every other medium. It is arguing holds that it is doing something to keep people safe on the internet, which otherwise would be at risk.

Their opponents state that the filter will slow down the net, that the filter will stifle free speech and that it will push deviants further underground. They’re arguing that people will simply circumvent the filter.

The other problems is that the #Nocleanfeed campaign is focusing on Internet exceptionalism.

There is no doubt that the classification system in Australian is deeply flawed. It is outdated. The Refused Classification system is ludicrous and wrong-headed.

But that doesn’t mean, and ordinary Australians don’t believe, that the Internet should be exempt from the laws that govern TV, books, DVDs, radios and every other publication or broadcast in Australia.

Alex Schlotzer from the ACTU and Greens Party has a similar concern about the campaign.

To effectively respond it requires a coordinated, concerted and sustained approach; with a plan for real political action. I don’t mean more protests and demonstrations. And I don’t mean sending more protest messages to Kevin Rudd’s Twitter account.

The other problem facing the #Nocleanfeed campaign is that their obsession with censorship has activated an extreme fringe of Internet “hacktivists”. These “Anonymous” cyber-activists have conducted Denial Of Service attacks against Federal Government websites. Their public statements are profoundly disturbing and often misogynistic. Some of the comments of the group are reported by Alex Dickinson at The Punch.

(It should be clearly noted that the Anonymous group are not affiliated with the #Nocleanfeed campaign, and I understand that the #Nocleanfeed campaign has condemned the DoS attacks.)

Recent polling indicates that most Australians, even if they were concerned about the filter, don’t consider filtering pornography and other RC material to be a vote-changing issue.

Comms_consult has some useful advice (which largely accords with my Key Messaging Advice here):

So what needs to be done? Well, there needs to be a strategic view taken of where this battle needs to be fought. And it needs to be on the terms that the opponents are strongest is on â€“ the technical impacts, and through its flow on economic and cultural impacts.

What needs to be said is:

“Something needs to be done to protect vulnerable people on the internet. However this filter is false hope. Families are being misled that this will provide the protection they clearly want online, and this project is an expensive and misleading exercise in futility. Essentially, this filter is not what it seems. It will not protect anyone because it will make the important job of policing the internet harder.”

This is not campaigning with branded avatars and attacks on the Minister’s character. There needs to be a debate about protecting children online and there needs to be options – including education, or whatever but it needs to talk to the public on positions they would be willing to accept.

I hope the #Nocleanfeed campaign starts taking better advice.

What union members want from their union's communications

Alex — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 03:23:21 +0000

In my line of work, I hear a lot of opinion expressed as fact. A common one is that “union members don’t want our communications to look too corporate”, or “our members want a lot of detail, not a short summary”, or “our slogan should be ‘screw the boss’ or something like that”. You get the idea.

Union organisers often have years of experience in talking with members, motivating them to action, getting them to listen. But they are not communications professionals.

Most of these experiences are based on “anecdotal” evidence. Useful, but sometimes misleading. For example, union activists and delegates are a very different audience to an inactive member. While many union members are progressive, and support or vote for Labor (or Democrat, or Lib Dems, or Greens, or Socialist Alliance), many are also “centrist”, a-political or even conservative. In the 2004 Australian general election, research revealed that around 40% of union members voted for John Howard! (This number was improved in 2007, where some unions’ research revealed a Labor vote of 60% or greater amongst their members.)

Nevertheless, my point is that unions often make communications decisions based on “gut feeling” or anecdotal, untested assumptions.

There has been some research into what union members, and workers generally, want from communications from their union. The research includes polling and focus groups, of members and non-members. I’ve seen some of these (unfortunately confidential) reports, produced by several unions, including my own and the ACTU. (I should also note that I have worked as an organiser at one of Australia’s largest unions, and in my view, union communications should support and compliment a union’s organising strategy.)

Without revealing all of the details, a clear motif appears from the results. Generally, across the board, union members and workers generally, want communications that are:

Positive, proactive, forward looking, friendly
Authentic – no cliches
Not adversarial or victimising (they don’t want to be made into victims or to have to fight their employer)
People focused (centred around members, colleagues, peers, the community they serve)
Professional and of a high standard

Positive, proactive, forward looking, friendly

Most union members are not attracted by communications (leaflets, posters, emails, phone calls) that are negative, reactive or backwards looking. They don’t like constantly having to “fight against” their employer or the government. They want their union to build, not tear down, and they prefer messages that represent a struggle restore rights as improving, not “clawing back” their working conditions.

Authentic – no cliches

Union members respond – like most people – negatively to cliches. The union movement has a large supply of labour-related cliches, most of which are not well-received by union members. Many non-members also respond poorly to the “militant” slogans used by many unions. This is not to say “you shouldn’t use slogans” – you should. Rather, your union’s slogans should summarise a positive, people-focused campaign goal.

What members and non-members want instead is communications that show that the union is made up of real people. They don’t like faceless bureaucrats, or “generic” images/text.

Not adversarial or victimising

Most workers like their jobs and want to feel proud of their work. They want to feel like they achieve something positive during their working day. While they can come into conflict with their employer from time to time, they don’t like to be constantly fighting. Unions that present a message that pits a group of workers in a (never-ending) fight against their boss will not be maximising their communications with a significant section of workers – especially non-members.

Similarly, workers don’t like to feel like victims. Victims are powerless, and connote emotions such as shame. Unions should be empowering members, and lifting them up. Presenting workers as victims goes counter to this.

People focused

Put your members at the centre of communications. Campaigns and communications need to about about them, not you. Whether it was Work Choices or the Employee Free Choice Act, unions need to emphasise improvements for workers, not threats to their unions.

Professional and of a high standard

Workers live in a world of high-standard communications, whether on television, the Internet or in print. There is an assumption that the communications (letters, leaflets, posters, ads) are well written, professionally designed and easy to understand and use. Unions have long been laggards in adopting modern design standards – this needs to end. (This goal is one of the reasons why I co-founded Creative Unions.) Unions can’t get away with having sub-standard, amateurish design for their communications. Many organisers I have dealt with say “members don’t like slick, corporate design”, or “members don’t want us spending heaps of money on design”.

Unfortunately, the evidence from research shows the opposite. Members do want good design. They want to know that their dues are going to a union that is professional in everything it does – industrial advice, campaigns, and – yes – design.

Unions need to be authentic – slick, corporate designs are probably not appropriate. But good design doesn’t need to be corporate. This is something that the environment movement has learned – you can have excellent design that is useable and intuitive, without it looking like a Coke advert (the World Wildlife Fund is a great example).