Four reasons why trade unions and sporting clubs should be sharing ideas
Professional sporting organisations and trade unions are more similar than you would think and there is a lot of ideas to be shared about running campaigns from both.
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Membership based:
Sporting clubs and trade unions both rely on membership to survive. There is one major difference though, sporting clubs start with zero members every year and have to re-recruit their membership base every season. Unions could use some of their approaches to use in highly casualised workplaces that have a high staff turn over. Sporting teams could be looking at the way unions use their membership to recruit new members.
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Active membership:
Sporting clubs and trade unions run on tight budgets and wouldn’t survive without a fair amount of good will and volunteer work from their memberships. Unions run the majority of their campaigns using their greatest resource which are active members. Arguably you can make a bigger impact when there is no budget for newspaper ads but you have a hundred people who can make phone calls to a targeted and strategic audience. NBA and Major League baseball teams are very good at running campaigns to get their fans to vote for the all star game. There are techniques used that either side could make use of.
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Slogans:
Unions and sporting clubs have traditionally used the same sort of slogans and call on similar ideas in their campaigns. You are just as likely to see side by side used by a union as a football team. It could be Your Team or Your Union. It’s interesting to see the use of pride, passion, commitment, working together, fair play and all for one used in the context of sporting teams membership drives. They are ideals that can be easily used by unions or sporting clubs.
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Community:
Both sporting clubs and trade unions are experimenting social media in an attempt to recreate the local community feeling that was in clubs and unions when they were smaller and more location based. Sporting teams are doing a much better job at adapting new tools to campaigns and using them to get their membership more involved.
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Find out more:
Sports marketing websites
http://www.sportspiel.com.au/
http://www.coylemedia.com/blog/
http://www.theuksportsnetwork.com/
Interesting article and NHL converting fans into foot soldiers with social media
Trade union campaigns websites
www.creativeunions.org
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