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 [...]
Activists, delegates and volunteers are the lifeblood of campaigning organisations like unions. Effective campaigning means keeping a track of your activists and delegates, and to do that, you need a proper database. There are myriad databases out there, some purpose built for membership organisations and others built for campaigns with beginnings and ends. Selecting the right [...]
Working as I currently do at a non-profit organisation as a development and marketing manager (and being on the boards of community organisations), I am struck by the strong parallels between the challenges faced by the NGO sector and by unions. One of my responsibilities is fundraising, achieved principally through philanthropic grants and individual donors. [...]
Big Data is all the rage at the moment. Leaders in every sector — business, government, non-profit, and unions — need to start thinking about the challenges of how to manage and constructively use all the data that their operations captures. According to IBM, Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so [...]
Most unions in Australia have adopted a growth agenda — with a strong focus on joining new members to the union. This typically involves teams of organisers who specialise in signing up workers to the union. By all accounts, this tactic has paid off handsomely in the raw number of new members joining unions. The [...]