A thousand new ways to join a union
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Join Together builds great join forms for unions, designed and tested to strike the balance between making it as easy as possible for members to join and capturing the information the union needs to make for a productive ongoing membership.
Initially our approach was to design a single form “flow” to cope with every foreseeable eventuality. The approach we use for this is one of progressive disclosure - a person applying to join a union only sees one thing at a time and if they don’t need to see it, they simply don’t. It means that members join in the fewest steps possible, each with extremely good usability – and never see anything that’s irrelevant to their situation.
For example, if you’re a student, unions generally need to know about your course and not a lot more. So why ask them to field a bunch of other questions about their job, salary, and a range of other things that are in their future, but not in their present? The goal is to get them in the door, and you can always use our Update:Upgrade service to turn them into full members later.
This works fantastically well, with high conversion and completion rates – and incredibly low support costs – but over the last couple of years, we’ve learned that we should evolve our approach to be even more specific to the member who’s applying right now.
Why evolve our approach?
Frequently, when a union organises and recruits members, it already knows quite a lot about the people joining. It might know where (a workplace) and why (a particular industrial issue) someone is likely to join. It might be trying to recruit new joiners or students. It could know who is doing the recruiting (a specific organiser or branch). Or it could know how the prospective member will find their entry point (in their break room, via a leaflet, a link on the company intranet, a webinar, a conversation with a rep etc).
This isn’t a big revelation. It’s how in-person, traditional organising and recruitment worked. Traditionally, the contextual knowledge starts a conversation that leads towards recruitment. Online, that’s proved harder to replicate. Most unions have one join form, with a single landing page, message and set of questions. Members have to fit themselves into that format. There’s no flexibility to really campaign and organise.
Imagine 38 Degrees or Megaphone or Organise worked in such a generic way. “Join our campaign” they would say. How many people would sign up to that, rather than one about a specific issue they care about?
We think joining online needs to better reflect the reality of a prospective member’s situation. To make that happen, it also needs to be easy for union organisers to create joining experiences more exactly tailored to each of these recruitment opportunities.
That’s what Campaigns does, by taking our already high-converting join forms for unions a stage further. By tailoring the approach based on what a union knows about a prospective member, Campaigns creates a series of individually better-converting pathways through our join forms which, when combined, further improve your union’s overall recruitment performance.
This means more members – who “see themselves” as they join – recruited at lower cost. And because it’s still ultimately one form, customised in lots of different ways, making changes is quick and straightforward. You just send us the configuration you need, and we’ll set it up for you.
How does it work?
Join Together’s “Campaign” forms allow you to set things up so questions are pre-filled or skipped, specific language is included and (in the near future) members get a customised landing page and email. This means you can give members the easiest possible path to joining, in the most persuasive context you can create.
Every “Campaign” has:
- Its own unique, readable URL (e.g.
join.yourunion.com/campaigns/amazon-wakefield) - A QR code you can use on printed material
- Campaign name and formatted text with images and links
- Customised questions and pre-filled answers
- Any other fields you want to add (e.g. referral codes or other ways of tracking campaign performance)
- Simple analytics (number of signups for each campaign over time)
Over time, you can create as many of these as you need, one for every possible recruitment campaign your union has. Hundreds or thousands of specific, tailored ways to join!
To set up Campaigns, all we need to know is what you know already – how you recruit your members. We’ll use a list that looks something like this (for a big general union):
| Form | Campaign name | Employer | Role | Workplace |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | “Join us at Amazon Wakefield” | Amazon | Warehouse Operative | Wakefield AMXL FC |
| 2 | “Join the union for delivery workers” | DHL | Warehouse Operative | Cody Business Park Depot, E16 |
| 3 | “The union for Unilever staff” | Unilever | Anyone working at Unilever Gloucester | Unilever Gloucester |
And so on…
Campaigns and the Employment Rights Act
Over the coming months, the Employment Rights Bill will pass, giving unions new rights of digital access to workplaces. Over the coming years this will mean tens of thousands of prospective union members encountering unions online, perhaps for the first time. Campaigns will help you tailor your message for that moment.
For example, you’re now running webinars for new joiners to explain what the union does. Campaigns allows you to post an employer-specific join URL in the chat, and leave a QR code to the same page on screen the entire time.
Or you’re allowed to include a link on the employer’s intranet. Why shouldn’t that link be perfectly tailored to that workplace and its workers, to give you the best shot at turning their attention into membership?
The new law is a huge opportunity for unions in the UK. Using Campaigns to tailor your recruitment for every eventuality is the perfect way to take advantage of it.
Learn more
If you’d like a demo of how Campaigns might work for you and to discuss how Join Together’s other products can help your union improve online recruitment and retention, get in touch to set up a call.