However, many unions still run highly manual processes for membership services and communications. Updates are sent as generic broadcasts across too-broad subjects. Common member requests get handled late or inconsistently. Staff time is absorbed in administering predictable and repeatable tasks, delaying the speed of response.

When should unions use automation?

Marketing automation isn’t about “doing digital” for its own sake or simply sending out more messages. It’s a way of dealing with standard member interactions more efficiently. Counter-intuitively, in many cases an automated response can better meet a member’s expectations than a human one.

When more of the basics are automated, the union can respond out of hours, or during gaps in coverage. Data we hold about a member can make communications more relevant. And scarce time and energy can be redirected towards organising, representation and support work that can’t (and shouldn’t) be automated.

This new guide from the TUC Digital Lab focuses on how unions make those choices consciously: understanding where automation adds value, where human contact remains essential, and how to implement automation in a way that saves time and expense, whilst reflecting union values and realities.

For unions, well-designed automation helps to:

• Reach members at moments when they are most engaged
• Provide timely, relevant information without relying on manual follow-up
• Ensure important messages aren’t lost when staff capacity is stretched
• Free up staff time for organising, casework and member support

A new Digital Lab guide

The guide contains examples for unions to consider. Not as a prescription, but a starting point – showing how automation might support recruitment, engagement and retention in practical, union-relevant ways.

Not all will be technically possible for all unions. But nearly all will be able to make use of something in this guide, and as unions extend their core technologies and communications tools, new opportunities will continually open to them.

Dowload the guide here

Thanks to colleagues at the ACTU’s Union Innovation Hub and agency Forward Action, who have helped inspire and author this guide.

The post Marketing automation for trade unions appeared first on TUC Digital Lab.

Data flows more widely across the union. Work happens across a wider range of devices, platforms and locations. All of this creates opportunity but it also creates risk.

The deeper we get into digital unions, the more often (and the more urgently) security and compliance will show up, with questions of trust, responsibility and organisational legitimacy.

Digital risk is inseparable from union responsibility

When members share their data (to join, ask for advice or seek representation) they are placing trust in the union that it can handle their sensitive information carefully, consistently and responsibly across the whole organisation.

For unions, this responsibility is especially serious. Union membership (or non-membership) itself is special category data, and union casework routinely involves highly sensitive personal information. When security or compliance fails, the consequences are not only legal or reputational. Members can be put at personal risk, and confidence in the union could be badly damaged.

Trust should be built into systems, not added afterwards

Trust doesn’t come from privacy notices or policies alone. It needs to be designed into everyday systems and processes.

Casework shows this clearly. Designing a casework system is not just about workflow or efficiency. It means deciding where sensitive data is stored, who can access it, how long it’s kept, and how the union can respond if a member exercises their rights. If these questions aren’t addressed early, risk simply gets postponed until something goes wrong, when it could be more damaging.

When systems are unclear or inadequate, people work around them. Files end up in personal folders. Case notes are shared through consumer messaging apps like WhatsApp. Surveys or forms are created using unofficial software. Each step may feel harmless on its own, but together they undermine the union’s ability to protect members and meet its legal obligations.

Shadow IT reflects gaps in provision

Shadow IT is often framed as rule-breaking. More often, it’s a signal for unmet need.

Union reps and staff are by nature problem-solvers (and often have a healthy distrust of authorities telling them what to do). When official tools are unavailable, slow or confusing, they’re going to reach for alternatives that are quick and familiar. The problem is not the intent – it is that these tools sit outside union oversight, security controls and data protection governance.

For unions, this creates genuine risk. Shadow IT makes it harder to enforce security standards, respond to subject access requests, or even know where member data is held. Addressing this isn’t just about shutting tools down. It requires leadership decisions about which tools reps and staff actually need, how those tools are communicated, and how new requirements are surfaced and acted on.

Cyber security depends on behaviour, not just controls

Most serious cyber incidents don’t begin with technical failure. They begin with human error. Phishing remains the most common way organisations are compromised, and unions are a frequent target.

Anyone can fall for a phishing attack – especially if they’re under pressure, on a mobile device, or when messages appear familiar and urgent. Treating security as a test of individual vigilance is unrealistic and unhelpful. Building a no‑blame culture and encouraging reporting and swift action are just as important as technical controls.

Compliance is a practical capability

Data protection compliance is often seen as paperwork. In reality, it’s an operational capability.

Unions must know what personal data they hold, why they hold it, where it is stored and who can access it. That is extremely difficult when systems have grown organically, data is scattered across tools, or responsibilities are unclear.

Mechanisms like RoPAs (Records of Processing Activities) are not just compliance artefacts. Used well, they provide visibility that supports safer system design, better decision‑making and quicker responses when issues arise.

Security underpins digital unionism

Security failures don’t stay contained. Breaches can force unions to notify members, regulators and the media within days. Trust can evaporate quickly. In sensitive sectors, the consequences can be severe.

Because unions are about supporting members in their working lives and helping them to exercise their rights, digital unionism can’t be about moving fast and accepting that things will break. It needs to be about building systems members can rely on.

That means:

• treating security, compliance and trust as design inputs from the start
• investing in usable, secure tools for reps and staff
• supporting staff and reps with training and guidance
• and maintaining clear oversight of where data lives and how it is used

Done well, this work strengthens unions. It makes digital change safer, more resilient and more worthy of the trust members place in their union.

Further reading

To explore these issues in more depth, the following Digital Lab resources focus on security, risk and trust in union digital practice:

• Managing shadow IT in unions
• What is shadow IT and why should unions care?
• How can unions choose which tech tools will work for them?
• Cyber security for unions
• Email phishing simulation to keep unions safe
• Privacy by design: Keeping union digital projects data safe
• Data protection responsibilities in designing systems and processes for union casework

About this article

This blog was drafted with the help of generative AI, drawing on the Digital Lab’s 330,000 words of published content, across reports, guides, case studies and blogs. If you’d like to know more about that process and how AI was used, visit the series starter blog here.

The post Digital unionism means security, compliance and trust appeared first on TUC Digital Lab.

In our experience, tech change projects are mostly about change and less about tech. Problems with the technology itself are rarely the decisive factor in whether projects succeed or fail. That’s more often explained by how change is led, paced and governed – and by whether leadership treats digitisation as an organisational challenge rather than just a technical one.

Digital change always disrupts existing practice

Every significant system change in a union affects how reps and staff work. It alters routines, assumptions and relationships between teams and roles.

When resistance occurs, it rarely comes from an in-principle opposition to digital change. More often, it reflects uncertainty about:

• how work will be reorganised
• what will be expected of different roles
• whether the change will make that user’s daily work easier or harder

If these questions are left unanswered for too long, confidence can evaporate – even when the strategic direction is sound.

Leadership is required long before decisions are final

In system change projects, there’s an important role for leadership in seeing through implementation after key decisions have been made.

That’s obviously important, but our experience would suggest that leadership matters even more at the points when priorities are being defined. Particularly when that means trade‑offs might be unavoidable between what different parts of the union see as important.

At these moments, clarity of purpose is more important than certainty of outcome. Unions make better progress when leaders can articulate why a change is necessary, even while acknowledging that not everything is known at the outset.

Many leaders can feel unequipped to take an active role in digitisation projects, worrying they don’t have the technical skills. Projects can end up being passed to technical managers too soon as a result. But sponsorship from the top is critical. Focusing on the strategy behind the changes, and understanding how the union can most effectively work through changes, are disciplines every bit as important as the technical decisions that will be made during the project.

Honest conversations about capacity matter

Another recurring lesson we’ve seen in the Digital Lab is that digital change often surfaces uncomfortable truths about capacity.

New systems may reduce duplication or enable new ways of working, but only after an initial period of increased effort. Sometimes a change that makes things easier for members will put more work onto the reps or staff who run the process. Or a successful change could result in much higher interaction with members, generating more work downstream to cope with the new demand.

If those realities get glossed over, projects can become associated with stress and overload rather than improvement.

Unions that manage change more successfully tend to be explicit about:

• what will not be done during transition periods
• where temporary workarounds are acceptable
• how progress will be assessed over time

This kind of honesty builds trust, even when the change itself is demanding.

Bring people with the change, not just through the change

In unions, members, staff, reps and elected lay leaders may all experience the same change differently. People are more likely to give change the benefit of the doubt if they can see that their practical knowledge has shaped the project.

That means making space for involvement before everything is settled: mapping who will be affected, asking people where current processes cause pain, using workshops or testing sessions to expose practical problems, and showing visibly how feedback has changed the plan.

It also means recognising that different groups will need different reasons to believe the change is worthwhile. Some will be motivated by new possibilities, others by seeing peers make it work, and others by reassurance that support will be available when the old way of working disappears.

A useful project habit is therefore to treat engagement as ongoing work, not a single consultation stage. Champions, user testing, peer learning and open channels for questions can all help people move from uncertainty into experimentation. They also give the project team earlier warning when the change is creating confusion, anxiety or resistance in parts of the union.

Governance shapes outcomes long after projects end

Digital change does not end at “go‑live”. Systems evolve, priorities shift, and new needs emerge. Unions benefit when they give early thought to:

• who owns systems once initial projects are complete
• how future changes will be proposed and agreed
• how learning from early phases will be captured and built into improvement

Without this, improvements can stall once the project team disperses, leaving unions with new systems but little capacity to support adoption or further development.

Leadership here is about creating conditions for ongoing improvement, not about micromanaging technical detail.

Leadership sets the tone for learning and adjustment

Perhaps the strongest signal leadership sends during digital change projects is how it responds when things don’t work as planned. Progress is going to be more likely if issues are treated as information – signals that processes, assumptions or sequencing need to change.

This approach doesn’t lower standards. It raises them, by making it possible to improve in practice rather than on paper.

Digitisation therefore tests leadership not on whether predictions are accurate, but on whether organisations can learn as they go.

Further reading

If you want to explore how unions have approached leadership and change during digital projects, the following Digital Lab resources go deeper into these themes:

• Managing big tech changes in UK unions
• 5 lessons on leadership for union digital change
• 8 principles for digital transformation in unions
  

About this article

This blog was drafted with the help of generative AI, drawing on the Digital Lab’s 330,000 words of published content, across reports, guides, case studies and blogs. If you’d like to know more about that process and how AI was used, visit the series starter blog here.

The post Digital unionism means showing leadership and managing change appeared first on TUC Digital Lab.

Digital unionism means moving beyond seeing data as a by‑product of systems, and towards treating it as a shared organisational resource that supports judgement, learning and better decisions.

Data only matters if it gets used

Most unions already hold a great deal of data. Membership records, contact details, engagement metrics and casework information are routinely collected and stored by our different digital systems. The challenge is rarely a lack of data.

However much data the union holds, the struggle is often rather to make that data accessible, and turn it into insight that can inform decisions.

Common challenges include:

• data that sits in one system but isn’t visible elsewhere
• reports that are produced regularly but are limited in scope and don’t cover exactly what’s needed
• uncertainty about which figures can be relied on

In these situations, data exists but it has little influence. It becomes something to account for, rather than something to think with.

Unions that make progress tend to focus less on collecting more data, and more on ensuring the data they already have is:

• accurate enough to trust
• accessible to the people who need it
• connected to real questions the organisation is trying to answer

Data quality is an organisational issue

A recurring lesson from CRM and infrastructure projects is that data quality is rarely a technical problem alone. Inconsistent records, gaps and duplication often reflect how work is organised:

• multiple teams collecting similar information in different ways
• unclear rules about who updates what, and when
• systems that allow workarounds rather than supporting shared practice

When data problems are framed as technical faults, they tend to persist and the focus becomes one-off remedial projects to update them. If they get treated as organisational signals, showing where processes or ownership are unclear, they might become easier to address on an ongoing basis.

Trust runs through all data use

Data practices are inseparable from trust — both internally and with members.

Internally, staff and reps are more likely to use and share data about themselves and their activities when they trust its accuracy and understand how it will be used. Externally, members’ confidence in the union depends on whether they see personal information being handled carefully, consistently and transparently.

For example, that means only gathering the personal data you’ll need to do the things that your members would reasonably expect you to be doing. Or not surprising them with a sudden jump in the ways their data is getting reflected back to them in their interactions with the union.

When data is mishandled, or when unions seem unsure about what information they hold on members or how it is used, trust can be damaged quickly. Building a mature relationship with data therefore means treating data protection, visibility and responsibility as foundational concerns, not secondary compliance problems.

The unsung heroes of most unions are our data protection officers. There’s often a bigger tension around data in unions than there is in companies. We have highly distributed communities, often charged politics and we reach deep into our members’ lives. Plus we’re working with some legally very sensitive data.

Most times in digital projects, we can go a lot further and faster if we treat the DPO less as the data police, and more as an enabling sherpa to help us find the common sense ways to approach the things we want to do.

Insight emerges through sharing data

Unions that get value from their data tend to devote space and resource for sense‑making rather than just expecting numbers to speak for themselves.

This might happen in leadership discussions, organising meetings, or planning conversations. Anything that involves people interpreting information together.

Some unions have introduced specialist data analyst or head of data insights roles that bring professional skills to help support this work across the union’s teams. That can be really helpful – as can informal opportunities to share and talk about what the union is finding out and where it might connect with others.

Without a focus on sharing and collective interpretation, even well‑designed reporting systems for our data can reinforce existing narratives rather than challenge them.

Digitisation changes organisational memory

Modern systems don’t just store data. They reshape what gets remembered, and what gets lost.

Unions moving to newer systems often discover that:

• important knowledge was tied up in individual inboxes or spreadsheets
• historic decisions were poorly documented or hard to trace
• reporting reflected what systems could produce, rather than what unions needed to know

Big digitisation projects force these issues to the surface as the union chooses what data it needs to migrate, standardise or discard.

Handled deliberately, this process can strengthen organisational memory and make learning easier. Handled carelessly, it can erase context and make past experience harder to recover.

Data supports judgement – it doesn’t replace it

Digital tools can make patterns more visible and decisions better informed, but they do not remove the need for experience, context or values.

A deeper relationship with data recognises this. It uses information to support human judgement, not to bypass it. Data can help unions spot emerging issues earlier, evaluate what is working, and learn from what isn’t. But it can’t make decisions on its own.

Digitisation works best when data is understood as a shared resource that informs and enriches decision‑making, not an external authority that overrides it and narrows discussion.

A deeper relationship with data enables learning and iteration

As unions experiment with new ways of working, data increasingly plays an important role in learning.

Whether improving member journeys, adjusting communication strategies or testing new ways of working, data helps unions understand the impact of change over time. It makes iteration possible, not as endless experimentation but as steady improvement informed by evidence.

This kind of learning does not require perfect data. It requires honesty about limitations, clarity about what matters, and willingness to reflect on evidence collectively.

Developing that relationship with data takes time. But it significantly increases a union’s ability to act confidently in a changing environment

Further reading

If you’d like to dig deeper into how unions are grappling with data in practice, the following Digital Lab resources explore these themes in more detail:

• CRM Report – how system design shapes what data can be trusted and used
• Running CRM projects in unions
• Data case studies and workshops from the Digital Lab blog collection – examples of how unions are using data to support organising, communications and decision‑making

About this article

This blog was drafted with the help of generative AI, drawing on the Digital Lab’s 330,000 words of published content, across reports, guides, case studies and blogs. If you’d like to know more about that process and how AI was used, visit the series starter blog here.

The post Digital unionism means a deeper relationship with data appeared first on TUC Digital Lab.

The same systems have enabled very different outcomes in different unions. The difference lies in how digital capability is understood, supported and embedded across the organisation.

Digital skills are unevenly distributed

We’ve been lucky enough to work with some brilliant people across nearly all our affiliated unions as part of the Digital Lab. But it’s shown us that the digital knowledge in unions is often concentrated in a small number of people.

That creates familiar risks:

• key systems being dependent on individual expertise
• digital responsibilities being added on top of already full roles
• limited resilience when staff move on or change roles

Unions are generally not short of commitment or ambition but can we struggle when digital work gets treated as specialist knowledge and siloed, rather than shared organisational capability. Where skills are isolated, progress is fragile.

Clarity of roles matters as well as skills

Digital Lab participants sometimes describe uncertainty about who owns what when it comes to digital work and its place in the union’s strategy.

Sometimes digital skills develop in a particular area of work – often the communications team – and then those people end up stretching to cover bits of other areas, just because those functions are ‘digital’ too.

When roles and authority are unclear, digital change slows down. Work is delayed while issues are passed between teams, or decisions get avoided altogether. Over time, this can lead to workarounds that solve immediate problems but compound and create longer‑term complexity.

Where unions make progress, they tend to be explicit about ownership – even when capacity may be limited.

Culture shapes whether tools get used or avoided

The same tech tools can produce very different outcomes depending on organisational culture.

In unions where people feel confident trying new ways of working, systems are explored, adapted and gradually improved. In more risk‑averse environments, the same systems can be under‑used, avoided, or treated as fixed and inflexible.

This isn’t just about enthusiasm for technology. It’s about whether people feel supported to:

• ask questions
• flag problems early
• admit when something isn’t working
• learn together rather than individually

Without that, attempts at forcing system change can end up entrenching some old habits rather than changing them.

Training alone is rarely enough

Many unions invest in training during major system changes. But one‑off training is rarely sufficient.

Skills decay if they aren’t put to work in a timely way. Confidence drops when processes don’t align with daily work. New starters struggle if knowledge isn’t documented and shared.

The union is more likely to make sustained progress if they tend to:

• build learning into everyday practice
• allow time for people to adapt how they work
• value incremental improvement over immediate mastery

Digital capability grows through use, reinforcement and reflection. Not through handover sessions and documentation alone (essential as those are).

Digital confidence underpins adaptation and innovation

As systems evolve and new possibilities emerge, unions increasingly need to adapt. Whether it’s improving communications, reworking data practices, or trialling new approaches, the capacity to respond depends on organisational confidence.

Unions with stronger digital skills and a learning‑oriented culture are better able to:

• experiment at a manageable scale
• identify what is and isn’t adding value
• adapt systems over time rather than replace them wholesale

This kind of iteration does not depend on having the latest technology. It depends on people being supported to learn, question and improve together.

Without investment in people, even the best technology will under‑deliver. And without leadership that recognises digital capability as an organisational issue rather than a technical one, unions risk repeating the same challenges with each new system.

Further reading

If you want to explore these questions in more detail, the following Digital Lab resources reflect how skills, roles and culture affect digital change in unions:

• Managing big tech changes in unions
• 8 principles for digital transformation in unions
• Design principles for a new union CRM project
• Double down on reps, not digital
• What does the new normal look like for digital change in unions?
• Scaling peer-to-peer SMS campaigns in a national ballot

About this article

This blog was drafted with the help of generative AI, drawing on the Digital Lab’s 330,000 words of published content, across reports, guides, case studies and blogs. If you’d like to know more about that process and how AI was used, visit the series starter blog here.

The post Digital unionism means skills and organisational culture appeared first on TUC Digital Lab.

But of course it is also about tech, and about unions developing a new relationship with it.

Tech systems shape what unions are able to do every day. And just as importantly, what they are unable to do.

Systems quietly define what’s possible

Membership systems, finance tools, document management, websites and comms platforms form the underlying machinery of the union. Members never see these systems directly. But they experience the consequences of how well, or how poorly, they work.

When unions struggle to meet members’ expectations, it’s often not because they lack commitment or good ideas. It’s rather because existing systems make some things easy, and others unreasonably hard.

That shows up in familiar ways:

• when joining works smoothly, but follow‑up is slow or inconsistent
• when data exists, but can’t be accessed by the people who need it
• when staff and reps rely on unofficial workarounds to get things done

In each case, the limitation isn’t effort or intent. It’s capacity shaped by infrastructure decisions. Often that’s from decisions made many years earlier, under very different conditions.

Digitisation is an investment plan, not a purchase

One of the clearest lessons from unions undertaking major system changes is that digitisation can’t just be approached as a one‑off purchase.

New systems bring ongoing costs that will often scale as we get more use (and return) from them:

• licences or subscriptions
• training and support
• integration with other tools
• additional overheads for security
• time spent adjusting processes and ways of working

Focusing only on the initial price of technology risks underestimating both the effort required and the benefits available.

Conversely, avoiding investment altogether often leaves unions paying a different price: in wasted staff time, duplicated work, fragile processes and missed opportunities to serve members better.

Union leaders need to understand investment in technology in terms of return and opportunity. That means a greater focus on siting tech investments within the union’s overall strategic plan. And on evaluating progress and the potential further returns from further development.

Aging systems create hidden risks

A number of unions have systems that still function, but only just. These systems might:

• depend on tacit knowledge held by one or two people in the union, or at the supplier
• require manual intervention to correct errors
• struggle to cope with changing scale of demand

The risk here isn’t just technical failure. It’s organisational vulnerability. When systems are brittle, changes become harder, and the cost of doing nothing quietly builds up over time.

Large system projects can feel daunting. But in many cases, deferring decisions doesn’t freeze the problem, it compounds it.

There’s an opportunity cost in systems that were rigidly designed to fit the way the union worked a decade or more ago. They work fine until the union tries to extend a process into new areas, or adapt to entirely new ways of working, at which point they increase the friction to change.  

Modern systems change how unions can work

Moving to newer systems isn’t simply about replacing old tools with faster or more reliable versions.

We’ve seen many unions in recent years move towards cloud platforms – also called Software as a Service (SaaS) – where the union rents tools and infrastructure rather than buying them.

This is a big shift in approach, but it has some big potential benefits. A new generation of more flexible and connected tech tools can change how information flows through the union, making it easier to:

• share accurate information across teams and roles
• reduce duplication and re‑keying
• use knowledge and functionality from one area of work in other areas
• connect directly to member-facing activities, to enable greater personalisation and self-service
• innovate new tech-enabled processes without major expense
• have tools with an ongoing upgrade path as opportunities change
• plug in best-of-breed tools for specific functions, and change them more easily if needed

Investment only pays off if practice changes too

The improvements a union wants might need new tech to make them possible, but new systems are not going to deliver improvement on their own. Productivity and service improvements only get realised when unions:

• revisit their processes alongside system changes
• support people to use the new tools confidently
• prioritise which problems new systems are meant to solve, rather than tackling too much at once
• factor in honest evaluation to understand the possible next steps

Without this, even well‑chosen systems can add complexity rather than reduce it.

The union has a balance to strike between bending new tech to fit old processes, or bending the union’s processes to fit standard approaches of new tech.

Digitisation is therefore as much about sequencing and focus as it is about technology. Phasing change, learning as you go, and resisting the urge to do everything at once consistently leads to better outcomes.

Systems are political, whether we treat them that way or not

Infrastructure decisions distribute power inside organisations. They determine who can see information, who can act on it, and who has to wait.

When systems are poorly aligned with how unions actually operate, the result is often informal decentralisation: people solving problems their own way because the official route is too slow or unclear.

When systems are designed and invested in deliberately, they can support a different kind of organisation – a union that is more resilient, more transparent, and better able to meet members’ needs consistently.

Further reading

If you’d like to explore how these issues play out in practice, the following Digital Lab resources go deeper on systems and infrastructure decisions in unions:

• Managing CRM change projects in unions
• Managing IT infrastructure modernisation for UK unions
• Introducing cloud CRM platforms for unions
• Running CRM projects in unions – workshop report
• Managing shadow IT in unions
• Design principles for a new union CRM project
• Building union CRM together – ACTU Union Innovation Hub case study
• Next steps in CRM for unions: PCS case study
• How to start a CRM change project in your union
• Union tech survey 2024 – some thoughts on the results
• Measuring our digital journey: A survey of UK unions
• Moving to Dynamics at CWU
  

About this article

This blog was drafted with the help of generative AI, drawing on the Digital Lab’s 330,000 words of published content, across reports, guides, case studies and blogs. If you’d like to know more about that process and how AI was used, visit the series starter blog here.

The post Digital unionism means systems and investment appeared first on TUC Digital Lab.

• They join (or try to).
• They receive messages – or they don’t.
• They look for help, advice or representation.
• They decide whether the union feels present, responsive and relevant in their working lives.

The TUC Digital Lab has worked on many themes around members’ interactions with their unions, such as online joining, events and meetings, campaigns, or ballots.

In each area, we’ve seen success is closely related to whether the union is meeting their members’ expectations of how organisations should work today.

Members bring modern expectations with them

Most union members interact every day with digital services that are designed around convenience, clarity and immediacy. That doesn’t mean unions should behave like commercial platforms, of course. But it does mean that members bring expectations that have been shaped elsewhere.

Those expectations often include things like:

• being able to join or update details without friction
• receiving clear communications at the right moments
• knowing who to contact and how
• not having to repeat the same information multiple times

We don’t pretend these expectations are easy for many unions to meet. But when unions struggle to make a success of digital interactions, it’s often because our systems, processes and ownership haven’t been designed from the member’s point of view.

Member experience is a journey, not an interaction

Most members don’t experience the union through one defining touchpoint. They experience it through a series of small moments over time.

These might include being asked to update details, taking part in a vote, reading a message on their phone, or trying to find an answer online. Each moment on its own may seem minor. Together, they form a journey.

When that journey feels joined‑up and intentional, membership feels valuable. When it feels disjointed or inconsistent, trust erodes, quietly and over time.

Designing for member experience therefore means thinking beyond single campaigns or tools. It means paying attention to how different interactions connect to one another.

Take joining for example. Joining a union is often the first sustained interaction a member has with it. That makes it a moment of real consequence.

If the process is slow, confusing or fragile, confidence is undermined before the relationship has even begun. If it works smoothly, it sets a tone: that this is an organisation that values people’s time, understands their needs, and follows through as you would expect it to.

The join journey doesn’t end when someone submits their form. It continues through confirmation, welcome and onboarding. Each step shapes how a new member understands what being in the union will actually feel like.

Consistency is critical

Meeting members’ expectations doesn’t always mean responding personally and immediately to everything. In many situations, what matters most is that common interactions are handled reliably.

Clear confirmations, timely follow‑ups, predictable processes and relevant messages all contribute to a sense that the union is paying attention. Where appropriate, well‑designed automation can support this. Not to replace human judgement, but to ensure the basics work consistently.

Members notice when things fall through gaps. They also notice when things simply work for them.

Digital maturity shows up at the edges

Many digital problems only become visible at the margins:

• members who join online but are slow to receive a confirmation
• activists who are keen to help but can’t be contacted at the usual times
• members whose workplaces or contracts don’t fit neatly into existing systems

It’s possible to design for a “happy path”, yet for things not to go that way for most users. These edge cases reveal how mature (or fragile) digital practice really is.

Unions that are digitally confident tend to treat these signals as feedback: indicators that something needs to be refined or rethought. Less confident organisations are more likely to see them as one‑off issues, or as problems caused by the member rather than the system.

Member experience is shaped by internal choices

One of the recurring lessons we’ve found is that member experience is an outcome of organisational decisions, not just front‑end design.

That includes decisions about:

• how data is structured and shared
• whether systems talk to each other
• who owns a process and who can intervene
• how much variation is allowed across regions, branches or sectors

All these choices shape whether members experience the union as joined‑up or fragmented; responsive or slow; visible or distant.

This is where digital change often becomes uncomfortable. Improving the member experience usually requires unions to revisit long‑standing ways of working – not just improve what members see on the surface.

Meeting expectations needs iteration, not perfection

A common trap is waiting for a perfect solution before making changes. But one of the most consistent lessons from the Digital Lab is that improvement usually comes through iteration.

Unions that make progress tend to:

• test changes in limited contexts (pilots)
• learn from what improves member experience – and what doesn’t
• adjust processes over time, rather than wait for a major overhaul
• share learning internally rather than hiding missteps

This is particularly important as new technologies emerge. Whether unions are experimenting with new communications channels, new ways of analysing data, or new tools entirely, the question is not “Is this finished?” but “Is this helping members right now – and how could it work better?”

Members experience the union as a whole

From most members’ perspectives, the union isn’t divided into teams, departments, regions, committees or branches. It’s a single organisation.

They don’t distinguish between “digital” and “non‑digital” interactions. They experience the union as present or absent; clear or confusing; joined‑up or fragmented.

That is why digitisation can’t be treated as a niche concern. Meeting members’ expectations requires:

• leadership that prioritises the member experience
• investment decisions that support long‑term coherence
• staff and reps being supported with tools that work
• a willingness to adapt and evolve

Digitisation for unions is often framed as a question of capability or of modernisation. But at its core, it is about experience.

It asks whether the way unions operate aligns with how members now live and work. Whether people feel supported at key moments. And whether the organisation feels coherent, trustworthy and responsive over time.

Seeing digital change through the lens of member experience doesn’t simplify the task. It raises the bar. But it also gives digital unionism its clearest purpose: making membership work better in practice.

Further reading

If you want to explore some of the themes in this blog in more detail, here are links to some of the resources it was based on:

• 8 principles for digital transformation in unions
• Online joining for unions – current and best practice
• A six‑step plan to retaining more members
• Building more effective landing pages for unions
  

About this article

This blog was drafted with the help of generative AI, drawing on the Digital Lab’s 330,000 words of published content, across reports, guides, case studies and blogs. If you’d like to know more about that process and how AI was used, visit the series starter blog here.

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There are reports, how-to-guides, case studies, workshop write-ups and blogs. It runs to over 330,000 words in all.

And as it’s spread over so many documents and such a long period of time, there’s probably nobody who’s actually read the whole corpus (if you have, let me know and I’ll send you a medal!).

I wanted to see what new uses we could make of this resource, so have been working with the generative AI assistant tool Microsoft Copilot 365 to repurpose it by scanning it all and drafting a blog series. The aim is to draw together starting points for people with different interests, and ways into the further resources they might want to check out.

So I started by listing out the different big themes that I think our work has uncovered, and came up with these seven themes that I wanted to explore:

• Meeting member expectations
• Investing in tech infrastructure
• Developing skills and culture
• Increasing use of data
• Digital leadership and change management
• Keeping safe and compliant
• Digital decentralisation

How AI was used

I set Copilot up to scan a SharePoint folder containing all our reports and guides. To get at the content across our blogs, I had Copilot convert a database export from WordPress into a long Word doc – filtering out posts from irrelevant categories.

I set it some tone guidelines and got it to draft a post around my first theme, revising the prompt and regenerating to get the tone closer to what I wanted. I edited it line by line, to what I thought was more suitable for a union audience, and to bring out specific Digital Lab subtext that Copilot hadn’t identified. I uploaded the edits to refine the tone further and then set about generating more posts in the same vein.

I still needed to do a line-by-line edit of the whole series, re-ordering or expanding on different points, or deleting chunks where it was going into unnecessary detail just to conform to a standard format.

Overall, this process still took considerable time in preparing materials, constructing prompts, lost time in false starts and a lot of effort in manual editing. But that was maybe half the time that writing the series from scratch would have taken. It also surfaced some good points across the themes that I probably would have missed if doing it purely by myself.

How Copilot performed

Trying this also helped me learn some big shortcomings of the Copilot 365 tool. Despite being marketed as being closely integrated with the Microsoft Graph for each user, this doesn’t go as deep as the ads suggest. It struggled dealing consistently with a large number of documents, and on some themes I noticed its results missing important concepts or giving generic responses. The 330,000 words I was trying to synthesize overall was several times larger than it was able to cope with.

Importantly, it won’t highlight this kind of problem to you itself. Generative AI doesn’t “know” anything and isn’t trying to get to the truth behind a question. It’s just coming up with statistically most likely ways that such as question might be answered. That means it’ll draft any amount of content supportive to the argument in your prompt – even if that means it loses track of evidence and starts making things up.

After I queried this it recommended me a solution to this drift – drafting a new prompt for every post that scanned the documents to build up a ‘corpus index’ (picking relevant points for that theme in each document, one document at a time). I also highlighted the documents I thought were most relevant to each theme, and between these methods it was able to get the volume of content down enough to synthesise and reformat more consistently.  

Start the series here

We’ll be releasing the blogs weekly over the next couple of months. We hope it’ll build up into a useful way of thinking about achieving digital change in your unions. And of course, we’d love to hear your thoughts or questions if you want to get in touch.

1. Digital unionism means meeting members’ expectations

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This is something the TUC and unions have consistently campaigned for, over more than two decades. And union experience with indicative ballots means we have a lot of good practice to draw on as we extend the tactics to strike votes and leadership votes.

But there are also a number of areas where the move to new ballots means a difference in importance, scale and audience, and there will be complications with the changes, due to the limitations of the new legislation. 

Unions have work to do in updating their rulebooks, cleaning and building their member contact data, establishing the processes and suppliers they will want to use, and planning their approach to get-out-the-vote campaigns in a different situation. 

But the work will be worth it in terms of increasing turnout and engagement, speeding up processes, meeting modern member expectations, and in many cases reducing balloting costs. 

This guide aims to give unions some practical directions on how to prepare, so they can make the most of the new right once it becomes law. 

Download the full guide here

The post Preparing the union for online statutory balloting appeared first on TUC Digital Lab.

What’s different, and what’s the same?

We’ve looked across the whole tool to update the different stages of good practice for unions on tech and digital. It’s been interesting to see what’s held up well, but also where new ways of working with tech can be seen coming through.

Since the last update, we’ve seen a continued move to the cloud for tech services. There’s also been a particular emphasis on doing tech with a greater eye on security, as unions have faced an increasing level of cyber attacks. And as emerging technologies like AI start to embed into more tech tools, unions need to consider the longer term view in how we’re responding.

At the same time, we’ve tried to keep as much consistency in theming and levels as possible. So unions using it should still be able to identify clearly where they are making progress from previous iterations.

What is the digital healthcheck?

For those who’ve never used the digital healthcheck before, it’s a tool to help unions benchmark their digital and technical maturity. Working through questions in an interactive Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, you choose the best fit for where your union currently stands across a broad range of categories.

Its purpose is to help benchmark your union’s current position against potential best practice, to identify for yourself where you may want to direct the next steps of your tech journey, and to have a way to measure it over time.

The tool aims to help illustrate what these digital and technical best practice could look like in a union setting, reflecting the challenges and innovations in both the movement and the wider world.

As such, there are no right or wrong answers. And there’s no one-size-fits-all solution that is going to be relevant to every union’s very different situation and experience.

Rather, this benchmarking process is designed to help the union’s leadership make the best choices when viewed alongside your own union’s context, resources and strategy. Gaps identified don’t need to filled at a uniform rate, but instead can give you a better awareness of the potential opportunities the union could move towards by choosing different paths.

Benchmarking also gives managers across the union a common framework to discuss developments in digital and technology, understanding better why a focus is being placed on particular projects and how they fit into the whole.

As your union progresses along your digital journey, you should revisit the benchmark from time to time. It helps you evaluate the impact of work done and it may be that a different area becomes more important to focus on as your organisational priorities change.

How to use the TUC digital healthcheck

You can download the latest version of the digital healthcheck here. You’ll receive a zip file containing the interactive Excel sheet as well as a document with instructions and glossary.

It takes about 20 minutes to complete and ideally requires senior and specialist input from across the organisation. We’d suggest using it as an exercise for your union’s senior management team.

The results are entirely owned by your union – the data is not shared by default. However, unions that do choose to share their results with the TUC are much appreciated. This helps us build up a better understanding of where unions are and allows us to tailor our Digital labs resources and workshops around the needs of affiliates.

Download the new edition of the TUC digital healthcheck now.

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