Learnings

Having created such a tremendous impact in just six months, smaller or newer nonprofits who’re looking to spark change in their communities and make the leap towards digital can certainly learn a lot from the Hospo Voice campaign.

Do your research beforehand

Be brave and believe in your cause...but back it up with adequate research. Begin right from the grassroots—before Hospo Voice took shape, they first engaged in several conversations with hospitality workers for well over a year, be it through focus groups or peer to peer conversations, before actually forming the union.

Harness the power of stories

Storytelling is absolutely vital to your campaigns. Figure out a way of capturing your stories and exposing them which gets people to take notice. This, more often than not, ends up snowballing into a machine which is capable of achieving concrete results.

“Stories matter and are so important. Finding powerful stories that will inspire others to take action has been absolutely vital to us, and so you need to find a way to capture these stories, and then get maximum value out of them, and think carefully about what kind of story you want to tell and plan out how you can do so. When we want to expose an employer, we're always trying to find a hero in this story, someone who is going to stand up and fight back against the injustices.”

Test, test, and test!

While building a set of custom digital tools, you need to ensure you do plenty of user testing, load testing, and beta testing. Always have a contingency plan in place to take care of unforeseen situations—such as your website crashing because of unexpected amounts of traffic.

Digitalization is best for a fragmented industry

And lastly, if your nonprofit or advocacy work is focused on an industry that is disorganized and fragmented in nature, digital is the best way to go. Use a combination of tools, just like how Hospo Voice does with CallHub, NationBuilder, Autopilot, etc. Employ different channels to organize people online and then mobilize them. In fact, for Hospo Voice, being “non-digital” is unthinkable!

“I can't see a scenario where we’d do this project without it being digital—it just doesn’t make sense to do it any other way!”

Relatively speaking, Hospo Voice is still in its nascent stages. But all the initial signs are pointing in the right direction, and that in itself is a big win for Australia’s first ever digital union and for the hospitality sector in the country.