As a union leader, you participate in long arbitrations, lead intense negotiations, conduct back-to-back meetings, handle member outreach, and so much more.
While you truly have union members’ best interests at heart, it can be overwhelming to balance these tasks while continuously thinking of new ways to engage members. Below, you’ll discover three limitations of traditional communication channels, and how using a private, authenticated community can better engage your audience.
1. They rely solely on social media.
Managing your organization through third-party social media groups creates reputational risk and limits your ability to reach the right people at the right time with the right message. Have you ever bought Facebook ads to try and reach your members? Then you know how expensive and inefficient this can be.
For better engagement, bring communications in-house with an authenticated community-building platform that ensures privacy among members, organizers, and leadership. Members join with an assigned activation code or with your organization’s email address. Once union members get access, they can engage in private group discussion, or connect in chat channels via group or direct messages.
2. They send too many emails and text messages.
Keeping members informed and engaged is essential to retaining your union members, but email inboxes are more cluttered than ever, and readership is declining. Large unions spend over a million dollars annually on these approaches.
Today’s members want to engage with relevant, timely and personalized information in modern mobile formats. They want to choose which notifications they receive, and when. Union leaders also want multiple options for member engagement. From push notifications, to read receipts, and pinned announcements, union leaders want options to reach members with messages they’ll actually read.
3. They don’t know what’s working.
These social media platforms are selling your members’ activity to advertisers and political opponents, leaving you in the dark when it comes to member engagement data. When you bring social interactions into your own platform, you can harness dynamic metrics to improve each member’s experience.
Would it be valuable to:
- Track how many members have seen your latest messages?
- See who has completed tasks from your checklists?
- Learn which topics have the most engagement?
- Discover the channels that get the most traction?
- Understand if members are satisfied with their benefits?
By using your own community platform, you’ll be able to understand what your members are most interested in, build effective targeted outreach, and provide targeted communications to drive member activism.
After years of membership decline, the tide is finally turning to the benefit of labor unions as the Great Resignation combines with favorable political conditions in Washington. Are you ready to capitalize on this once-in-a-generation opportunity and strengthen your membership to newfound levels?
