By Augusto Correia, Vice President, the Journalists’ Union | 2 min
We had two main concerns: the need to increase our membership, as it’s becoming increasingly difficult to unionise people, which is impacting our revenue and our ability to act; and the difficulty in bringing the leadership team together, keeping everyone motivated and getting them to work more actively for the union.
During the course Becky helped us realise that the best way to reach our members was first to get to know them. She supported us in creating a questionnaire and defining strategies to get closer to our members – for example, calling new members to ask why they joined and how we can support them. Regarding the steering committee, Becky helped us understand each person’s limitations and how to work with them.
We are currently working on the survey to be sent to members, communicating with newsrooms and calling those who join us. Regarding the leadership team, we defined specific roles – something that had been decided but never implemented, and with this decisive push it finally moved forward. We changed the meeting routine from mandatory weekly meetings to optional ones, allowing each member to focus more on their weekly tasks, while holding a monthly meeting to present results, proposals and action suggestions.
Based on this, we also created different working and communication groups, including an executive committee, to handle more urgent and routine matters. And we established we would meet in person – since half of us are in Lisbon and the other half in Porto – every two months.
Key takeaways
The training was absolutely essential for us to understand our weaknesses and strengths. It allowed us to identify our mistakes and define strategies to face the challenges ahead. Our recommendation to every union is to do the same: seek help, find specialised organisations or individuals, learn as much as possible, and start working immediately on new strategies – because we can’t afford to lose the initial momentum.
If you would like to receive bespoke training from Unions21 on building capacity or any other topic, get in touch.
