Alex White

Campaigner | Unionist | Strategist

Myths and misperceptions about marketing for unions

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Marketing is still widely disparaged as a term in the union movement, and progressive organisations generally. Partly this is a skepticism born from shows like Mad Men and The Pitch, and partly it is a misunderstanding drawn from the popular perception that marketing is just opinion polling, focus groups and TV advertising.

Despite this, every union markets itself every day, even if that marketing is not perceived as such. I think it’s time for unions and progressive advocacy organisations to reconsider what marketing is, what good marketing is, and what role it should play.

Broadly, marketing covers a whole range of activities that are external-facing for the union: the members, potential members and supporters. The table below covers the main areas that I refer to when I walk about “marketing”.

Union marketing model - Busting the marketing myths for unions

The general low esteem that marketing is held by unionists is preventing unions from more effectively promoting membership growth, campaigns and causes. This post looks at some of the myths about marketing that I’ve seen, and I hope it helps you more effectively promote your unions and campaigns in future.

1. Marketing is just about promotion

It’s easy to think of marketing as just about promotion (like a website, brochures or ads), because the advertising element of it is obviously the most visible and expensive outcome. Of course, promotion (“visibility” in my model above) is an important part of what marketing is, but it is the end point of a process. Without embracing the preceding and proceeding elements of marketing, you’re promotional activities won’t be as effective as they could be.

2. We already know what our members want, so we don’t need to do market research.

Your organisations and delegates who are in daily contact with members have a good anecdotal feeling of what your members want or need, but you shouldn’t make decisions based on that gut feeling alone. There is no substitute for an in-depth understanding of your members, and I’ve argued before that unions should understand their members better than employers do. The most valuable thing marketing can bring to your union is this member research (this of course covers potential members and supporters generally).

Market research like opinion polling, when done properly, is expensive, but for any major campaign, whether it is an industry campaign, major recruitment blitz or a public policy campaign, it is absolutely worth the expense to make sure you get the right information. For smaller campaigns, you can substitute small-sample surveys, including online surveys. It is worth asking for assistance from a professional, or from a peak body that may have (free or cheap) in-house expertise, to assist with getting your samples and questions right.

3. Unions don’t need marketing staff

The union short-hand for “marketing” is often “communications”, but this catch-all often means either “media relations” or “graphic design”. Again, marketing is not just promotions, and the communications element (covered under “visibility” in my model) is a specialist function of a broader task set. Regardless of whether you put marketing in the job title, you need someone at your union who thinks about and is responsible for the union’s brand, it’s promise, and the delivery.

Because delivery obviously bleeds into the organising and industrial functions of the union, arguably, an elected union official should have management responsibility. This also re-emphasises my point that all communications/marketing for a union must support the organising activities of the union.

4. Marketing can’t be measured

John Wanamaker said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”. This has set the scene for over eighty years, and contributed to a mindset that says that it is impossible or difficult to know what communications and marketing activities actually work.

This may have been more accurate in the analogue days of newspaper ads, but direct marketers and charities who regularly use direct mail know that it simply is wrong. In today’s digital age, where you can measure every click and scroll, it’s even more wrong.

The reason that this attitude is widespread is that, especially in many unions and progressive organisations, specific and measurable goals are not set before campaigns are started. It’s very hard to measure something if you don’t know what your objectives are.

Unions spend a lot of time and money on printing posters, leaftlets and newsletters, but I’ve only rarely seen discussions about what impact those activities should have.

5. Only the big numbers matter

With regular reporting in the mainstream media, and even at union conferences, focusing mostly on the big numbers, like tens of thousands of members, hundreds of thousands of supporters or millions of Youtube views, many smaller unions may simply tune out the importance of marketing. This is exacerbated by the trend of “big data”, and I’ve argued before that unions should concentrate on “medium data” before looking at “big data”.

The reality is that marketing impact is about achieving your objectives; if your union’s objective is to recruit 100 new members in a key sector, or build a targeted group of 50 or 500 supporters in a particular community, those numbers are still important and could still benefit from a marketing approach.

6. Cutting the marketing (or communications) budget will have no effect

Unions are under constant scrutiny, and in countries or industries experiencing contraction, your union may be struggling to sign up new members. This creates pressure to cut the budget for marketing in general and communications in particular. The most obvious place I see this is for unions’ web and digital presence.

The problem is that this is a false economy, and reducing your investment in your union’s major non-tangible assets can have serious implications in the long run.

7. Social media is only for broadcasting our messages

This is something I’ve seen for many years and have been writing about for as long. Social media is often seen almost entirely as a new-fangled kind of brochure, where the union’s message is shouted out. This fundamentally ignores the real strength of social media and social campaigning, which is that it empowers members and supporters to engage in conversations.

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I believe that if unions could just get over the opprobrium it generally feels towards marketing, it could really help them transform into member-centred organisations, boost their profile (in a good way) and fuel membership growth.

How to get members to talk about your union on social media

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One of the regular questions I receive from unions is “how can I get members (or activists) to share our message on Facebook?” or “what will get members talking about the union on Facebook?”

Sound familiar?

Union organisers instinctively know that a positive “union experience” can be a powerful trigger to encourage word of mouth recommendations from members. Activists who participate in successful collective action, members who receive support and encouragement above and beyond from an organiser, supporters who see the impact of their actions at a mass rally.

Members, supporters and activists who have an amazing union experience will feel emboldened to recommend that others join and participate with the union.

It is a maxim of organising that members are the best recruiters of members. Personal recommendations from friends are more trusted than other kinds of promotions (such as advertising or news stories).

It is essential for unions to use those personal experiences from members, supporters and activists.

But how?

Create experiences where members can share a story

Union events, honestly, can be pretty boring sometimes. In fact, truthfully, they’re often boring. The result is that often members don’t want to talk about unions.

What they will talk about is where the union has positively impacted their lives.

Thinking hard about how members can have a union experience that impacts their lives is not easy.

For delegates, there’s a few things you can do. By making delegates feel special, and giving them something exclusive, you’re giving them something to talk about. Free is also good, so avoid asking delegates to pay for union activities like participation in conferences or for union merchandise. The benefits of the word-of-mouth from your delegates should be worth far more.

For members or supporters, a way to make them feel exclusive and special is by providing access to “insider” information. For example, giving members a sneak-peak behind the scenes of a campaign, or giving supporters access to union briefings about important issues.  While this isn’t as powerful as an experience, it can still help tap into positive feelings.

Look at other areas of your union activity. How can you emphasise these feelings in your interactions with members. Many unions do this through highlighting that the industrial advice members receive is an exclusive benefit of membership, not available to non-members.

Make your requests to your members clear (and up front)

Don’t presume that your members and supporters know that you want them to share or talk about your union. Not asking, or asking in a round-about way can simply cause confusion. If you want your members to do something, make it simple, doable and easy to achieve — and make it a single ask. Multiple requests can also cause confusion.

Unions often want members to share graphics or links on Facebook. However, your members will probably not want to share all your messages, graphics or links with their friends. This is why it’s incredibly important to make your messages and asks relevant — which means segmenting your requests.

It’s also important to make your message interesting enough that your members and supporters will want to talk about it with their friends.

Provide a strong call-to-action

Your ultimate goal is to get your supporters and members to share your content; your members’ goals on social media is much more complex: connecting with friends, being entertaining, sharing interesting links or photos, getting kudos or any number of other things.

What your members are unlikely to do is share something if your content is boring and if you don’t ask them.

Remember, you’re asking your member or supporter to advocate for your union or campaign. Make them feel like a star for doing so.

There are also ways to encourage your supporters to share with incentives. Lots of unions have merchandise and other goodies from campaigns, such as t-shirts, stickers and caps. Running competitions or using the campaign “chum” to encourage members to share, comment or like your updates is a simple but often effective way to get that engagement and sharing.

Five reasons your union should use Facebook Ads Power Editor

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More and more unions are using Facebook to advertise, but chances are if you’re boosting your posts or advertising on newsfeeds, you’re using the standard “Self Serve” Facebook ad manager.

This is potentially a big mistake, and you could be wasting time and money.

I’ve long argued that social media and Facebook in particular is useful for unions because it can help identify and mobilise activists, engage members, and encourage people to become activists.

The key is that ultimately your social media campaigning needs to encourage real people to do real things in the real world.

Facebook advertising is increasingly an important part of the union social tool-kit.

This is especially the case because changes to the Facebook algorithm means that “organic reach” (that is, your union page posts appearing in fans’ newsfeeds) has been reduced. This is a decision by Facebook to encourage page-owners (like unions) to use advertising to reach their fans.

And an increasing number of unions are advertising on Facebook.

But most unions just click the “boost post” or “Get more Likes” button. This makes sense. The Self Serve ad manager in Facebook is easy to use, the default option, and for most union communicators and campaigners it is more or less intuitive.

Unfortunately, you’re not getting the real benefits of social advertising by using the default Self Serve manager, and you could actually be wasting your time and money chasing vanity metrics.

The Facebook Power Editor is what you should be using for all your Facebook ad creation.

The Power Editor is a special browser plugin that allows you to use all the advanced tools to create and manage ads.

I’ll be up front. Power Editor has a very steep learning curve, and it’s not particularly user friendly. It is more complicated to use than the Self Serve tool. But, if you’re starting to spendany money on promoting posts and advertising on Facebook, then you should dump the Self Serve tool and start using Power Editor.

Here’s five reasons why.

1. Targeting

The promise of advertising on Facebook is that it allows you to use the vast array of social and personal information that Facebook has, and let you target the most relevant audience possible. Using the Self Serve tool, you have some targeting options, but they’re actually relatively limited.

Power Editor’s targeting tools look very similar to the Self Serve, but are more granular.

I mentioned in an earlier post about Facebook’s custom audience feature. Power Editor lets you use that, and create “lookalike audiences“. Lookalike audiences let you create a target audience of completely new people who are likely to be interested in your union or its campaign because they’re similar to the custom list you’ve previously uploaded.

If you’re trying to grow your pool of potential new supporter leads, but have reached the limits of your existing custom audience, then the lookalike audience tool could help you grow.

Power Editor also lets you target people using “Partner Categories” — that is, categories of people managed by massive data-storage companies like Acxiom. While at first look this may appear useful only to for-profit businesses, it can be useful for unions’ political campaigns. For example, the AMWU could target “car buyers” in Victoria with ads about job losses at Ford and Holden, or the Fair Wear/TCFUA campaign could target “fashion-conscious” shoppers with ads about garment workers in Bangladesh.

Using the “Boost Post” button gives you almost no control over targeting. If you use Power Editor, you can focus your efforts on a much more specific, relevant audience.

2. Advanced Features

The Self Serve tool is a simple tool that makes advertising on Facebook easy and fast. As a result, the features are fairly limited; most of the advanced features are rolled out either to Power Editor, or to the API (which are used by third-party tools that you need to pay  for). While some of the advanced features eventually make it to the Self Serve tool, many do not.

I’ll be honest. The Power Editor is more complicated than the Self Serve tool. When you first start using it, there is a steep learning curve. But you really owe it to yourself, your members and your goal of winning your campaigns to use the advanced features that are available.

The list of features is changing regularly, so I’ll just list a few that are currently available when I’m writing this.

  • Custom Audiences (I’ve written about them here)
  • Lookalike Audiences (see the first reason above)
  • Saved Audiences (a real time-saver, lets you re-use audiences you’ve previously built)
  • Partner Categories (see the first reason above)
  • Conversion Tracking (this uses the pixel tracking, which I’ve touched on here)
  • Conversion Specs (this lets you optimise your ad bidding based specific objectives, such as clicks, web clicks, etc)
  • Domain Sponsored Stories (lets you promote when someone shares or likes a page on your website)

There are reasons that unions should be using every one of these advanced features. But the main one is improving your relevance and conversion rates.

3. Placement

Self Serve lets you create ads that appear in the side-bar or the newsfeed, but it’s still fairly limited. Power Editor gives you far more control over where your ads will appear and on what kind of device (e.g. desktop or mobile).

One of the major items in recent news is the Facebook sales revenue, which has jumped largely on the back of mobile ads.

Using Power Editor, you can create ad creative specifically designed for Facebook’s mobile apps. This means text and images can be customised for mobile, rather than using the same images for both desktop and mobile.

With an increasing number of people using Facebook on their mobile phone, it’s mad not to create variations of all your ads which are designed solely for mobile.

4. More control over bidding

The Self Serve bidding system is like a black box — it’s impossibly to really know what’s going on, especially if your choose the “your bid will be optimised to get more likes”.

Power Editor gives you much more finely tuned control over your bids.

Why is this important?

Because your budget is likely limited, you should be interested in getting the maximum conversion for your union’s money.

Experimenting with various bidding options, whether it’s Cost per Click (CPC) or Cost per Mille (CPM or Cost per 1000 impressions), will mean as you grow more familiar with the tool you should lower your costs.

5. Bulk ad creation

Self Serve lets you boost one ad at a time, or create one promoted post or ad. This can be good for a once-off, but if you’re managing an ongoing campaign with multiple themes or targets, it can a nightmare to use Self Serve.

Power Editor lets you create scores of ads. You can duplicate ads and use saved audiences, which allows you to tweak ads, images or audiences without going through the entire ad creation process. Think of all that saved time not having to re-select the same countries, languages, ages, interests and so on.

Are you using Power Editor already?

Most unions that I’m aware of use the Self Serve tool — and why not? It’s the default option. But I’d be very interested to know if there’s unions out there already using the Power Editor. How are you finding it, and what kind of results are you seeing?

Let me know in the comments.

You can now advertise on Facebook only to your members

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An increasing number of unions are advertising on Facebook, either through the “traditional” sidebar ads or through promoted posts.

Thanks to changes to Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm, more and more unions and progressive campaigning organisations are being forced to advertise to reach their fans and supporters. The targeting for those ads has always been somewhat mysterious; it’s a black box which has lead to accusations that Facebook ads are a waste of money or even a scam.

What if you wanted to send a highly targeted call-to-action to your existing members (or supporters) using Facebook? It’s possible, and could prove very effective.

You could also target your lapsed members, retired members, delegates or activists, campaign supporters or prospective members — all through Facebook. You can even target people who have visited your website or a specific page on your website (e.g. your campaign petition page).

The way to do this is to use the “custom audience” feature.

Because these people are already aware of your union or campaign, it means that they are more likely to convert. You can also improve the relevance of your ads by targeting specific segments of your membership or supporter database.

All you need is their email address or mobile number.

What does it mean for your union’s campaigns?

The “custom audience” feature is pretty useful, and as a union communicator you should start to learn how to use it as a targeted alternative to the standard boosting/advertising. Using “custom audience”, you could

  • Re-engage with former members or supporters to promote a new event or campaign.
  • Encourage potential members to join your union.
  • Promote a post to members of a specific workplace which relates to a campaign they are involved with.
  • Announce the launch of a campaign or general union event; you could also target previous participants or target those past participants who have not yet registered (to announce the close of entries).
  • Acquire fans for your page that are already members or supporters. That way you are consistently engaging with them to reinforce your messaging, compliment other campaigning activities and engage them to become more involved and active with your union.

A lot of unions hope to reach their existing members on Facebook. The “custom audience” tool means you can advertise for likes to only your existing members.

Creative campaigners and communicators will no doubt think of many other uses for this feature.

How does it work?

You build your “custom audience” by email or mobile phone numbers, using the Facebook Power Editor tool. Facebook matches the email addresses against the list of users to build that audience.

This does mean that you’re uploading a list of your members or supporters to Facebook in order for Facebook to cross-reference it and build a list for you to advertise to.

To use the website re-targeting feature, you’ll also need to install tracking code on your website. Your web developer should be able to do this easily for you, and for open-source CMSs there are plugins.

If you have ethical issues with this, it is something that your union will have to talk about internally. The terms of use for this tool are here. According to the TOS, Facebook deletes the data you upload to it after it completes the matching process, and only retains unique Facebook IDs.

Get started

As I wrote earlier, I’ve seen a lot of unions use promoted posts or ads for their campaigns. Most of it seems to be very simplistically (if at all) targeted, or preoccupied with vanity metrics.

Custom audiences allow you to narrow-cast your Facebook messages and calls to action like never before.