Communicator | Online Strategist | Considered Opinions
University of Warrick academic Jeremy Waddington and UNISON national officer Allan Kerr authored a fascinating article for the Industrial Relations Journal, Membership retention in the public sector. The article examines membership retention in one of the United Kingdom’s largest public sector unions, UNISON, with over 1.3 million members. Waddington and Kerr surveyed 5000 members to [...]
Calls to action should be the life-blood of your union’s campaign website (and indeed, your main union website). Whether you want the visitor to join your union, send an email, donate to a strike fund or subscribe to your union newsletter, your website should be geared around encouraging visitors to your site to do something. [...]
I often get asked about union websites – and what makes a good website. There’s loads of general advice out there about how to get a fantastically designed website, and what goes into making them usable and interactive. Check out Smashing Magazine as a good place to start for general advice. You could also check [...]
There’s been a lot said about union websites – here’s four things we all know but are worth saying again. You’re not engaging anyone Your website doesn’t engage your members. Even if you allow comments. Even if you create a union “blog”. Even if you add a “share” or “tweet this” button to the bottom [...]
Just a quick tip for when you’re designing your union website: always include a favicon. A favicon is the little 16 pixel by 16 pixel icon that represents your website next to the address bar or in a tab. The favicon is an important part of your union’s website design. All major browsers will render [...]
The ACTU Organisers Conference saw the launch of the election year advertisements from Australia’s labour movement. I’ll be writing up some highlights of the Organisers Conference (you can see some of the tweets using the #powerup hashtag) later, including some interesting campaigns that were showcased. In the meantime, here are the ACTU ads.
The ITUC has launched a new online campaign highlighting the exploitation of workers and children in the third world. The campaign’s website – Change the World - is very professional, although it is unfortunately flash-based meaning that it takes a long time to load. The campaign’s posters are amazing – very confronting and stark in [...]
Back in 2003-04, David Peetz and Barbara Pocock (from Griffith University and the University of Adelaide) conducted a survey of 2500 union delegates to examine the power of workers in their workplace. You can download the paper here (pdf). The paper on the report is definitely worth reading and at 11 pages (many of which [...]
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 [...]
Every union communication challenge is unique – the circumstances, membership, employer, and so on are different every time. Having a framework to assist in messaging for diverse campaigns can make each campaign easier, and can help union communications anticipate what the employer (or opponent) may say. (George Lakoff called this “framing”.) The messaging quadrant The [...]
Google Documents is a free online service that provides word processing and spreadsheets that are stored online (in the “cloud”). Google Docs basically allows you to mimic Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The main feature (in my view) is that it is online, so it can be accessed from any computer connected to the Internet, [...]
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