By Rob Yeldham is Director of Strategy, Policy and Engagement for the physios’ union the CSP. | 9 min
I have spent 35 years working in communications, with the last 11 working for a trade union.
Trade union communicators are committed and talented specialists and vital to engaging members and advocating for them with the public and decision makers. But are unions doing enough to get the most out of their communication functions?
Engaging different audiences to involve them, prompt them to act or change their views is central to our work as unions. We are competing for their attention with mainstream media, employers and other communications. We therefore need to be highly effective at communicating. Yet communications and engagement are still sometimes seen as either something anyone can do or as a support function within some unions. This needs to change.
I believe that to be more effective for our members we all need to be taking these critical actions:
Make sure comms is in the room
It isn’t acceptable to exclude comms from the top table and it isn’t acceptable for the senior team to not understand your comms strategy. Senior leaders need to understand the importance of strategic communications just like they need to understand the importance of the union’s finances.
If we want comms to play an effective role it needs to be at the top table. In business, public services and the third sector having a senior comms person as part of the senior team in an organisation is rightly seen as essential. In your union:
Is the most senior comms person on your senior management team?
Are they an Assistant General Secretary or equivalent?
Do they have direct access to the General Secretary and national executive?
Are they in the room when the really big decisions are being made?
If the answer is no to any of these questions you need to think, because you are making it very hard to communicate well and engage your members and other stakeholders.
Challenge and advice from senior comms specialists results in better decisions because good comms professionals ask the questions which help us make good decisions:
What are we trying to achieve by doing this?
Who is this for?
Who do we need to influence?
What do we want them to do?
What motivates them?
Where do we find them?
How will we know it is working?
How do we manage any risks?
Having someone whose role it is to ask these questions around the top table results not only in clearer and more effective comms, but also in more effective industrial influence, organising and member services.
Make comms strategic and stop using comms as a “post box”
A strategic communications approach can help recruit more members and deliver industrial wins for members. Don’t use your comms teams to “send stuff out”. Think of communications as a strategic asset which, if used right, can do so much more than “raise awareness”. Comms objectives should be about real impacts such as recruiting more members through effective marketing or securing political commitments through public campaigns.
Integrate communications to be heard
It can be hard for members or other audiences to know what unions think is important because of the competing messages we put out. Branches, regions and different national departments can all be pursuing their own tactical communications, resulting in divergent messaging and competing with ourselves to be heard.
Comms does not have to be centralised to be integrated, although that is one solution. Whatever our structures, unions need to have mechanisms in place which ensure common objectives for everyone involved in communication, strong message discipline and effective scheduling. That can be challenging where there are deep traditions of decentralisation or siloed departmental cultures. Unless these barriers are taken down, we won’t be doing an effective good job for our members.
Use public relations campaigns as a freestanding approach
Even with reform of employment relations legislation under Labour, it will not always be possible or desirable to mobilise members for industrial action. Finding effective alternatives to advance member interests and demonstrate to members that we have their backs is therefore vital. A public relations campaigning approach is one option.
New competitor bodies which don’t have the infrastructure of traditional unions are already using public campaign tactics to build membership and represent their demands. Mainstream unions should be making more and better use of publicity to pressure employers and governments.
Organise on social media
The movement’s response to the recent organised racist and Islamophobic attacks on local communities highlights the need to up our game on social media. Whilst more traditional organising and comms remain vital, we must not surrender the social space to the far right, big business and social conservatism. The context might be different, but the same fundamentals of organising and effective comms apply on social media.
The far right exploited social media to normalise their poisonous rhetoric and to organise their supporters. We must provide an alternative, normalise our values and show the majority opposes hate. So, we need to catch up fast and work with other progressive organisations outside our movement in this space. This is a space where working together will be important.
Use insight and evaluation to drive impact
There is still a sense that there is a “union way” to do things and that doesn’t include measuring success or learning from feedback if it challenges our comfort zones of historic union language and identity. But to connect with potential members and younger potential activists we need to be willing to learn their language and find the channels and approaches which work for them, not those we are comfortable with. Our narratives, framing and channel choices should be tested, amended and evaluated to make us more impactful.
Invest in systems to make comms more efficient and effective
Many unions are reluctant to invest in modern ICT systems when there are seemingly higher immediate priorities. This is a challenge for communication and engagement. Our members and prospective members are used to personalised communications from their daily online interactions with businesses. Personalisation would mean that we could more easily retain members, recruit new activists or get members to support industrial action because we could target motivational messages based on the interests of individual members.
The best most of us can do is roughly segment some of our communications by sector, demographics or geography. This limits how effective we can be at engaging individual members and makes us look increasingly old fashioned. We don’t need to spend on a plc scale to address our capabilities, especially if we purchased systems
collectively.
Plan for the impact of AI
AI is impacting on our comms whether we like it or not. AI enables non specialist colleagues and activists to generate content be it text, images or video. The risk is we end up with just more “stuff”, less impact and greater reputational damage. To avoid this unions need their comms function to plan how AI will be used, which tools to use (considering for example the equalities issues with some tools), who is appropriate to set tasks for AI tools and how to review AI generated content to ensure accuracy, tone of voice and policy nuance. We should plan for our comms teams to be doing less writing and image creation, but more strategic planning, commissioning, editing and evaluating to make sure the AI generated content is appropriate and effective.
Professionalise your comms functions
Many communicators of my generation leaned our skills on the job. Today many more people have degrees in marketing, public relations or similar comms disciplines. Many of the old guard like me have professionalised along the way through CPD and professional accreditation. But in some unions, activist volunteers or non specialist staff “do comms” alongside their main role and often with little or no training or support.
If we want to be more effective, we need to professionalise comms and engagement just as other sectors have. In some contexts, this might mean refocusing negotiators, organisers or policy colleagues back on their own specialisms and having the comms done by union comms specialists working collaboratively with them. Whether unions demarcate roles or not, professionalisation should include investing in regular training, development and specialist supervision for anyone undertaking a comms function, paid or unpaid. Everyone communicating for a union should be subject to the same standards and oversight, led by your most senior communications professional.
Share and learn together
Our individual member and public comms will always need to be subtlety different reflecting our different membership, politics and industries or professions. However, we could share more. Whether it is commissioning CRMs, developing member insight or organising against the far right on social media, there is great scope for unions to collaborate more on comms and engagement.
Unions 21 has been a beacon for promoting and sharing of best practice on comms and member engagement for over a decade. The UK’s TUC has also been doing good work to bring unions comms leaders together to facilitate cooperative working. We need more of this and for more unions to join such collaborations.
Obviously not all unions are the same. These provocations to improve our comms will apply more to some unions than others. Resources are also always tight in unions, but not to make progress in any of these areas is a sign a union is not facing up to the future.
We all have work to do, my own union included, but let’s keep going and share what we’re learning. Join us at Trade Union Renewal 2024
Acknowledgement – thanks to the colleagues from a number of Unions 21 unions who have advised on this piece.
Rob Yeldham is Director of Strategy, Policy and Engagement for the physios’ union the CSP. He is a board member of Unions 21 and a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations. He writes here in a personal capacity.
