Building a website for your branch, local or campaign
Don’t Broadcast Engage
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Show notes
Intro
2:00 Websites and communications strategy
- Most union websites are inadequate – one way communication
- Unions behind in using social media tools
- Unions don’t have the resources to meet this need
- If you take control of information at a local level you can change this
- Create the role of Communications Officer
- Develop a communications strategy that speaks directly to the workplace
- This improves discourse, increases engagement and makes the union more democratic
- Growth of general unions mean information is often unfocused
- Unions use twitter to broadcast, not communicate
9:40 Building a simple website
- What should be on your website?
- WordPress – how we created Cyberunions on wordpress.com
- Register a domain – you can export this later
- WordPress installed on a server we rent – hosted by Telekommunisten
14:00 Younger members have a better grasp of technology
- They should be encouraged to organise autonomously at a local level
- As much power as possible should be devolved down to local level
- Young activists have great ideas
17:00 Appropriate technology – using SMS/text messaging
- One text lead to a walk out and a contract victory!
- Hivemind – decentralised intelligence is powerful
- Creating private groups in identica
21:00 Experimenting with Diaspora
- Aspects – choose who sees your status updates
- Find a community-supported Diaspora pod
- There is development on an identica plugin for Diaspora, but it doesn’t work yet
25:00 Developing a web strategy – an overview
- Get permission (or forgiveness)
- Delegate responsibility – communications officer
- Create a WordPress site
- Register your domain
- Create practical pages with relevant information
- Email is still a useful technology
- Use social media and integrate it with your website
- It takes time to build an online presence
- It’s easy to create a mobile version of your site – many people use smartphones, use services that connect with them
- Don’t broadcast – engage
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Good episode 🙂 I’m my branch’s communications officer and a long time linux user, so the technical side of this stuff is pretty familiar to me. What I was wondering is what sort of things would you include in a communications plan? Do you have an example of one? I recently submitted one to my branch however it would be pretty useful to compare to others…
Actually, we’d be interested in seeing yours. Would you like to come on the show sometime and talk about it?
Yea I’d be up for that 🙂 only caveat is that said plan isn’t hugely ambitious and hasn’t been accepted by my branch yet…
Actually, we’d be interested in seeing yours. Would you like to come on the show sometime and talk about it?