By Vic Barlow, co-director, Agenda | 7 min
This article is part of our ongoing series on union operating models. We've been exploring structure as the skeleton, muscle and nerve system of a union - the formal and informal relationships and ways of working that determine how a union obtains and commits resources, defines authority and accountability, and acts as a conduit for information flow. In previous posts we looked at governance and financial planning. Here we turn to communications.
When unions think about structure, they tend to think about bargaining arrangements, governance frameworks and staffing hierarchies. Communications - if it features at all - often comes last: a budget line, a newsletter, a social media account.
That's a mistake. And it's one that costs unions more than they realise.
Communications isn't a delivery function that sits at the end of the pipeline. It's infrastructure. It shapes whether members join, stay and get active. It determines whether decision-makers listen. It's the nerve system through which the union's strategy becomes visible - internally and externally. If it isn't working, nothing else works as well as it should.
What a communications function actually does
Strategic communications is the planned and purposeful use of communication to help an organisation achieve its long-term objectives. For unions, those objectives are specific and demanding: recruit members, welcome them in, retain passive members, engage active ones and influence the employers, politicians and regulators who shape workers' lives.
That cycle - recruit, welcome, retain, engage, influence, celebrate - requires different messages, different channels and different approaches for different audiences at different moments. A new member needs something completely different from a long-standing rep. A junior minister needs a different case made than a shop steward. A comms function that can't segment, sequence and adapt across these audiences isn't really doing its job.
This is why it matters where communications sits in your structure. A comms team that only produces output - press releases, newsletters, posts - is operating as a production unit. A comms team with strategic standing helps shape what the union does, not just how it talks about it. That means being in the room when decisions are made: bringing insight about what members are asking on the website, what media sentiment looks like on a campaign, what messaging is landing and what isn't.
The structural question: what are you trying to do?
Before thinking about whether you have the right communications team, you need to be honest about what the union is prioritising. The balance of your communications function should reflect the balance of your strategy.
If your primary challenge is recruitment - reaching workers who don't yet know the union exists - you need marketing capability: the ability to reach new audiences, make a compelling case and convert interest into action. If your challenge is retention - keeping passive members engaged enough to stay - you need relational communications: regular, relevant, member-centred content that reminds people the union is working for them. If your challenge is influence - changing policy, shaping employer behaviour, winning public argument - you need external relations capability: political messaging, media management, crisis preparedness.
Most unions need elements of all three. The question is whether your current structure reflects those priorities or whether it's drifted into doing whatever is loudest or most urgent.
What good looks like
A communications function built around the union's strategic aims will typically cover:
Brand management - a consistent narrative, look and feel, and tone of voice that runs through everything the union produces. Not just a logo, but a clear articulation of what the union is for, who it serves and what makes it distinctive. This narrative should be broad enough to encompass the work of organisers, membership, policy and campaigns - uniting different teams under one story rather than allowing competing messages to fragment the union's identity.
Content and copywriting - the ability to write for different audiences across different channels: the website, social media, newsletters, briefings, speeches. Most unions underestimate how much skill this requires. Writing well for a WhatsApp-first audience of younger workers is not the same skill as writing a Parliamentary briefing.
Channels and scheduling - a planned, coordinated approach to what goes out, when and where. Without this, unions end up with swamped channels and silenced audiences: key people getting too much irrelevant content and tuning out, or vital moments passing without any communications at all. A content calendar - mapping what's going out across all channels against the union's strategic priorities - isn't a luxury. It's how you ensure the union communicates rather than just publishes.
Analytics and insight - understanding what's working and adapting accordingly. This means more than counting impressions. It means knowing what members search for on the website, what issues generate engagement on social media, what messaging moves people to join or get active. That insight should feed back into the union's wider decision-making - informing policy development, organising priorities and where to invest.
External relations - the capacity to manage the union's relationship with media, politicians and other stakeholders. This includes crisis preparedness: knowing in advance what the union's position is, who speaks and what the key messages are when something goes wrong or a fast-moving story lands.
The in-house vs outsource question
Many unions, particularly smaller ones, can't staff all of this internally. That's fine - but it requires clarity about what you need to own and what you can commission.
The things worth keeping in-house are the things that require deep organisational knowledge and rapid response: brand stewardship, member communications, crisis management and the editorial judgement that comes from understanding the union's culture and priorities. These require someone who knows the organisation, understands the movement and has the standing to push back when a proposed communication would damage rather than advance the union's interests.
What you can outsource more readily is specialist production: design, video, technical web development, specific campaign support. The Society of Radiographers, facing a ballot and potential strike action, brought in external press and PR support precisely because the moment required specialist capacity at speed. That worked because the core narrative and union-wide messaging was clear - the external team had something to build on.
The risk is outsourcing the strategic function itself: relying on a freelancer or agency to set the communications agenda because the union hasn't invested in that capacity internally. When that happens, communications becomes reactive and transactional. You get output. You don't get the strategic value.
A question worth asking
If you're thinking about communications as part of your operating model review, here's the question we'd suggest you start with: does your communications function help the union decide, or just communicate after the decision has been made?
If it's the latter, that's a structural problem. It means communications is sitting too far down the chain to add the value it should - to bring insight in, as well as to take messaging out.
Building a union that's fit for the future means treating communications as infrastructure, not afterthought. The unions that do this well aren't just better at telling their story. They're better at knowing what story to tell - and why it matters.
The power of effective communications will be explored in more depth at Changing hearts and minds, Agenda’s flagship one-day event for trade unions and other civil impact organisations. It takes place on Wednesday 10 June - book now.
In the next post in this series, we look at platforms and technology - the digital infrastructure unions need to deliver at scale and make better use of their data.
This series draws on Unions 21's work with unions on operating models, and on insights from practitioners across the movement. We're grateful to Vic Barlow at Agenda Communications for her contribution to our Future Leaders programme, which informed the thinking in this post.
