I’ve managed and developed a number of union websites over the years. However, a project I’ve recently completed presented a completely different type of challenge - building a website for a union branch. Union branches often rely on a small number of volunteers, many of whom carry out union duties in addition to their day jobs. While large union websites can be preoccupied with using the latest social media tools and providing online services for their members, the needs of the union branch website are quite different. As Paul Moore of the CWU’s Greater London Combined Branch put it: “We may

Back in 2000 I was keen to push back boundaries in the way unions used IT. I wanted to create the first online joining system for a trade union. After finishing at university I started working for a union, and I was soon put in charge of their website. I took the opportunity to create the first union website to enable members to view and amend their details online along with the first ‘virtual branch’ system. My next step was to introduce the first full ecommerce online joining system that didn’t depend on any paper signatures or other offline actions. But I soon hit a snag. The union's

There was a lot of interest in my report about trade unions and search engine optimisation. I've been asked about the scoring metrics I used to estimate how well a website would rank in search engine results. The metrics I used are the Page Authority, Domain Authority and MozRank provided by the leading Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) tool provider, SEOMoz.org. I’ve also used the most famous metric of all, Google PageRank. We need to be careful when using metrics. They do not necessarily reflect how high a website will appear in results from Google or other search engines. For example, a well

I’ve been doing a lot of work on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) recently. It’s a skill that is growing in demand as more and more organisations realise how much traffic they can generate through search engines. Having worked at Prospect and still working with union clients regularly, I thought I’d take a look at how effectively trade unions in the UK optimise their websites for search engine traffic. For those of you unfamiliar with Search Engine Optimisation, it’s the art of making a website appear as high as possible in the ‘organic’ search engine results. This is as opposed to the

Viral marketing is a way of using existing social networks to reach an audience for campaigns and advertising on the internet. The idea is that, if the message is good enough, people will tell their friends about it through email, Facebook posts, Tweets etc. People are more likely to value the opinion of their friends, so if the message is successful then a large amount of viewers can be reached for a relatively small outlay. Unions have been experimenting with viral marketing for a number of years, with varying degrees of success. The TUC was one of the first to experiment with this approach

Like most technologies, operating systems – the software that runs on computers and allows everything else to work - keeps on changing fast. Most of us will have heard of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS or even Linux. However, the old dominance of these familiar operating systems is changing. Cloud computing is being touted as the future by some, as demonstrated by the recent launch of Apple’s iCloud service that allows users to store data such as their MP3 music collection online. Cloud computing refers to the idea that people are storing more of their information “in the cloud” of the Internet

China is undergoing a period of rapid industrialisation and growth, having recently become the second largest economy in the world. This has led to strains in industrial relations. With China’s strict controls on the free press and trade unions, and the sheer size of the country and population, it’s been difficult to get a clear picture of the industrial action taking place. Thanks to a great new online resource, this has become easier. Developed by Manfred Elfstrom, a PhD student at Cornell University in the United States, this new website shows a map of China, highlighting each occurrence of

Union Learning Reps (ULR) play an increasingly important role in the workplace, and a new tool has been launched to help them – the web based Climbing Frame. This website combines learning content with a mechanism to manage the progress of learners. The system replaces a previous version that had to be installed on individual machines.Unionlearn, the TUC body set up to promote learning, found that whilst users recognised the benefits of the Climbing Frame, its potential was undermined by compatibility and accessibility problems. This was particularly noticeable inside company networks. Being

The NUT used to communicate with lay officers across England and Wales via post and phone. The Union saw how this could be improved by utilising technology to do things more quickly, cheaply and effectively. The result is ‘Hearth’, an online community and resource centre that has transformed communication between the union, its officers, staff and reps. Phil Katz, the Project Manager behind ‘Hearth’, explains why the NUT acted; “Local authorities were merging, so we had some large localities that could trace Union roots back 130 years, and other small, newer associations of just 600 members

When unions first started using the web, documents such as magazines, newsletters and circulars were loaded onto union websites, usually on an ad hoc basis. In addition, there was a centralised system for storing items like publications, circulars and minutes. Intranets were yet another repository. This expansion has caused problems. Some collections would be the only store for certain documents, while other items were duplicated across all the collections. For Union staff, this has caused confusion, and members have found that the information available from the website is usually limited to a