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).