Posted 29 May 2022

As soon as this pub closes, the revolution starts.

—Alex Glasgow

There are lots of things we’d rather “do later”. Sometimes, all it takes is the tiniest excuse to sap your momentum, crack open YouTube and watch half an hour disappear. Other times, you’re interrupted. Something pops up and you suddenly can’t remember what you were meant to be doing in the first place.

When it comes to people joining unions online, we see that “do later” tendency in the data.

It manifests itself in three ways.

First, the data shows people who are motivated to visit the union website and click the “join button”. But then they see complexity. They see barriers. They see the requirement to have a payslip to hand or to know their payroll number or to create a login and password. They see the need to have to “apply for” (rather than just “join”) a union that isn’t as welcoming and straightforward as it could be.

The moment they get this feeling, their finger hovers for a few seconds, then a new tab or app is fired up and that moment of inspiration is lost. They’re gone, possibly never to return.

We work with unions to strip those barriers away. You might want a potential member to create a login for the website (perhaps it’ll help them access materials created by their branch in future). But… do they really need to? At the point of joining? Is that what they want to do? Right now? Or is it what your membership software wants them to do?

If someone wants to join a union, let’s take away every possible barrier to make sure they can do it now, not later (or never).

Second, we want people to just… flow… through the process of joining. That’s why we typically break it into a series of tiny, logical, simple steps. What’s your name? Where do you work? What do you do? How can we contact you? It should be two or three minutes of easy question followed by easy question followed by easy question. Little to no thinking required.

Finally, we deal with those pesky interruptions. Something happened and got in the way? Well, Join Together allows people to pick up an incomplete application and finish up later. If they start, but don’t finish, we’ll email them a reminder the next day, containing a link that drops them back into the process exactly where they left off.

We’ve found this results in as much as 10% more completed membership applications (and if they never click the email, their incomplete application is automatically deleted after a few days to protect their privacy and keep you GDPR-compliant). 10% more people joining simply because you remind them to complete their application!

If you want people to “do it now” and join a union, remove the barriers and make it logical. If you want people to “do it later”, make sure to send them a reminder.

Both of these are just a small part of what Join Together offers unions - right now.