Many peak bodies or national union offices are adept at the lobbying process and regularly send representatives and delegations to parliament. They are practiced and know their way around the often arcane parliamentary traditions.

However, some of the most effective lobbying takes place away from the hallowed halls of Parliament and in the parliamentarian’s electorate office. Local MPs take special interest to events in their electorate, especially ones involving job losses or gross injustice. Even conservative parliamentarians who traditionally do not line up with unions can be allies.

Over at AlexWhite.org, there are two basic pieces of advice for rank-and-file union member delegations to visit MPs.

1. Members of Parliament get lobbied every day: don’t assume you’re the only group talking to them about your issue.
2. Most MPs have limited amounts of time: if you can’t get your point across in 15 minutes, you’re probably wasting your time (and theirs).

Read the entire post here.

The post is based on research by a number of Australian unions, including the ACTU and NTEU.

Members want union communications that are:

• Positive, proactive, forward looking, friendly
• Authentic – no cliches
• Not adversarial or victimising (they don’t want to be made into victims or to have to fight their employer)
• People focused (centred around members, colleagues, peers, the community they serve)
• Professional and of a high standard

Read the full post here.

We at Creative Unions recently used the website Usabilla to run our usability test on this site. This online service allows you to upload an image file and then invite up to 25 testers to check the image – for free. (You pay for more than 25 test subjects.)

This service can be used for more than just websites.

Here is a copy of one of the posters that Atosha designed for the NTEU strikes last year. The poster has been put through Usabilla and people have been asked to click on the most important features for them. As you can see, a heat-map has been generated over the areas that received the most clicks (that is, is perceived as the most important).

Users can be asked numerous questions, and can leave notes and other comments – multiple pages (or posters) could be tested at once – meaning that you could test variations on the same poster. (The poster here is an example only; testing wasn’t carried out before it was printed.)

What this means is that unions can test their main communications materials (leaflets, posters, advertisements) on small groups of members (between 5-10) before hundreds or even thousands of dollars is spent on printing or publishing them.

Jackob Nielsen, a respected expert on website usability, suggests that only 5 usability testers are needed to find approximately 90% of problems. By using Usabilla on communications materials, unions would be able to learn whether their communications would be effective, and how it could be improved or clarified.

The best bit is that this excellent service is all for free.

Microblogging is like normal blogging (blog = web log), but shorter. Whereas there is no limit on the number of words in a normal blog article, microblogging typically will be limited to no more than 250-500 words. The most famous microblogging service is Twitter, but there are lots more, including Tumblr and Posterous.

A microblog could be useful for a union that doesn’t have time to maintain a fully fledged blog and a host of other social media tools. Microblogging can therefore be a social media bridge between blogging and Twitter.

Eric Lee from LabourStart has written about how Posterous (a microblogging site) can be used for union campaigns. Over at Alex White’s site, there are some other union microblogging suggestions for campaigns:

Posterous can thus be used for short updates on the union’s activities (or on a specific campaign’s activities). This shouldn’t be simply an automated list of media releases and emails. Rather, it should be made up of similar content that you would put on Twitter, Facebook or a blog: Quotes from members, photos from rallies or members meetings, short videos of speeches, or copies of campaign material (such as posters or leaflets).

So long as the microblog follows the Four Pillars of Social Networking, it can act as a replacement for maintaining separate Twitter and Facebook accounts.