There was no brief. There was a phone call from UNISON's Director of Communications.
The strategic question underneath it was the one that matters most to any union: how do you recruit new members, deepen the engagement of the ones you have, and keep them? UNISON's answer had to work at the scale of 1.4 million people, across every region and service group in the country.
Digitally, the union wasn't set up to answer it. Fifty separate websites and seven hundred thousand pages, almost none findable through search. Capable teams had bought good tools to solve immediate problems — tactical answers where a strategic one was needed. A complicated, unmanageable technology stack led by suppliers' roadmaps rather than UNISON's needs had created data protection risks, endless workarounds, and manual intervention at every turn.
Members felt it directly. Getting support — whether from the branch, region, legal team, or call centre — was harder than it should have been. Participating in the democracy of the union, through consultations, ballots and elections, wasn't straightforward. Getting active and joining in happened across too many places at once. UNISON's own research described the experience as archaic, as a maze, with no single source for help.
And 1.4 million member records sat in a single third-party membership system. UNISON controlled them, but they were static — a record of who a member was, rather than a resource the union could act on.
There was no standard or consistent way of doing anything. Done was the only measure of success.
We started with evidence, not a solution. Extensive member and employee research set the targets for the Member Experience Programme: more new joiners, deeper engagement, better retention.
Then we built a team that mixed our consultants with UNISON's own staff champions and specialist partners. That was deliberate. Unions aren't structured for complex technology change, but nobody understands a union's members better than the people inside it. Handing responsibility to agencies would have failed.
We defined the member experience as 12 interconnected journeys mapped to the member lifecycle — becoming aware and joining, staying informed, getting support from the branch, region, legal team or call centre, voting in ballots and elections, participating in consultations, becoming an activist, and re-joining after a change of job. Each journey had a named internal owner. Each was rebuilt from research and tested with members. Only then did we choose technology, selected to serve the journeys rather than the other way round.
The result was a new member portal offering more at the click of a button, 24/7 and mobile-first, built to high accessibility standards. A consistent brand across the whole estate made UNISON feel like a single organisation whilst retaining the variety of voices that makes a union what it is. A new learning management system gave members and activists a single place to develop. Self-service first meant members could get what they needed without routing everything through the branch or the call centre.
Data came first. A new data platform synchronised the membership system with the wider ecosystem — removing a single point of dependency and, more importantly, putting member data to work beyond the static record. Better integrity, faster change, and everything that followed made possible.
Content strategy was redesigned alongside the technology. National communications returned to the national team, so regions could concentrate on the issues their members cared about most. The volume of surveys was reduced; the quality of what was captured improved. The goal was a membership that didn't feel overwhelmed with communications — but felt the union understood them.
And because platforms on their own change nothing, we redesigned two operating models alongside them: communications, and a new product operations function to run the platforms and use live data to keep improving them.
"Members don't come to UNISON because they want a digital experience. They come because they need support, they want a voice, or they're ready to get active. Our job was to make sure nothing got in the way of that."
Clare Williams — Programme Sponsor and AGS Communications, UNISONThree years of work, three months since launch. Technology costs are net zero: legacy systems retired, the stack streamlined onto open-source and consumption-based services.
On engagement: daily use of the member portal has risen sixteen-fold. Eighty per cent of new members now use it daily, against five per cent before launch — it is somewhere members go, rather than somewhere they reset a password.
On recruitment, the most telling number was an accident. At launch, £1M a year of paid acquisition spend was switched off because of expected downtime. It was never switched back on — the consolidated, optimised site was converting new joiners organically at the same rate. Nobody would have run that experiment deliberately.
And on retention, UNISON can now see engagement as it happens rather than inferring it after the fact — which members are active, which are drifting, and where to intervene. Decisions run on live insight rather than assumption. That is the change that outlasts the technology.
