Episode summary

Chris Walton has been a full-time union official for forty years. He organized bank and insurance workers in the 1980s, ran the ACTU’s national training arm, and served as assistant secretary during the Your Rights at Work campaign. Somewhere in there he decided he’d gotten “a bit old and backwards in his ways” and taught himself digital. What he found runs through the whole episode: there’s no new principle of organizing, but there are new tools worth having. He built the Union Innovation Hub on that idea, and two-thirds of the union movement in Australia and New Zealand now share it.

From there it gets practical. Engagement is the whole game, Chris argues, and the trouble is you can’t see it without measuring it, so he explains engagement scoring: put a weight on every member action (opening an email might be one point, leading the bargaining committee ten) and you can catch at-risk members early and spot the workplace leaders you didn’t know you had. He and Riley line up the two systems, Australia’s open shop where a retail union can lose 25% of members a year and Canada’s Rand formula where members don’t quit but quietly go dark.

Chris closes on the culture that makes the tools work, “have a go,” and the news that the Hub’s iMIS for Unions is now open to Canadian and US unions through Bursting Silver.

In this episode

• No new principles, just new tools. Why forty years of organizing still hold, and why Chris calls digital “part of the solution, not a whiz-bang solution.” The test for anything you do: can it be a bit more effective and efficient with a digital technique?
• Engagement is the key. Getting members off the sidelines, from inactive or fee-paying to active and ready to act, is what wins campaigns and bargaining. The principle is old. The ability to measure it is new.
• Engagement scoring in plain terms. Put a weight on every member action (open an email, come to a meeting, join the bargaining committee) and pull it into one source of truth. Then use it to catch at-risk members early and spot the workplace leaders who haven’t stepped forward yet.
• Two systems, one problem. Australia’s open shop, where a union has to recruit and retain as well as engage and one can churn 25% a year, versus Canada’s Rand formula, where members don’t quit but can disengage with nothing to flag it. Same lesson: engagement is what makes you ready for a fight.
• Member journeys that don’t feel like a subscription. A join triggers a personalized six-to-twelve-month automation of emails, texts, and portal content that lifted average member tenure in Australia to just over eight years. It backs up the steward conversation instead of replacing it.
• Buying technology as a movement. Why 30+ unions stopped going one-off and built a shared base that covers about 90% of common needs, which cuts implementation costs and lets them share quarterly improvements through a user group. Plus the “pass the hat around” model for funding new features.
• Now available in North America. The Hub’s Union Suite for iMIS is open to Canadian and US unions as a starting point, delivered through local partner Bursting Silver.

Hosts & Guests

Riley Miller – Host

Sales and client success lead at Bursting Silver, helping membership organizations modernize iMIS, data, and AI workflows across North America.

Chris Walton – Guest

Director of Union Innovation at the ACTU’s Union Innovation Hub and a forty-year veteran of the Australian union movement. A career organizer, he founded Organising Works, served as assistant secretary of the ACTU, and built the movement-owned technology platform (the Hub) now shared by more than 30 Australian and New Zealand unions. Fresh off his 2026 UK TUC Digital Labs tour.

Resources

Resources mentioned

Chris pointed listeners to the Union Innovation Hub’s open library of guides and thought pieces — free and not-for-profit, built for unions:

Union Innovation Hub — Resources & Innovation (all guides and fact sheets)

iMIS for Unions — the Hub’s shared platform, now available to North American unions through Bursting Silver. Schedule a call to walk through the solution today.

About Bursting Silver

Bursting Silver is a fully remote consultancy specializing in modern CRM, iMIS, and AI solutions for membership organizations across North America. We’re a 3-time Great Place to Work Certified company that helps associations, unions, and regulatory bodies modernize legacy systems, improve data quality, and deliver better experiences for staff, members, and registrants.

Our unique ability is finding the simplicity in the complex.

Learn more about Bursting Silver

The Modern Membership Org Podcast

Full Transcript

Chris Walton: I know I have to modernise a bit. I don’t pretend it’s some sort of magic solution. All digital innovation is, at its simplest definition, everything we do — can it be slightly more effective and efficient if we use some digital techniques?

Riley Miller: Hello everyone, and welcome back to The Modern Membership Org podcast. My name is Riley, I’m with Bursting Silver, and I’m excited to introduce a very special guest today — all the way from Australia, we’ve got Chris Walton. He’s spent four decades inside the union movement, from organizing bank and insurance workers in the 1980s to founding the ACTU’s Union Innovation Hub, a movement-owned technology platform now shared by more than 30 Australian unions.

He’s got a lot of research under his belt on how unions operate and how to engage more effectively. Chris joins us to unpack what North American unions can borrow from that playbook: how to get members off the sidelines and behind their campaigns, and why buying technology as a movement beats going it alone. Without further ado — Chris, welcome to the podcast.

Chris Walton: G’day, Riley. Nice to be here.

Riley Miller: Excellent to have you here, and I appreciate you making the time, especially given the time change. We’re two ships sailing between sunrise and sunset here — it’s impressive coordination.

Chris Walton: Well, I think you’re ahead, so let us know who won the race and I’ll put a bet on.

Riley Miller: Sounds good — that’s teamwork right there. So for those who don’t know you, take a minute, give yourself an introduction, and let people know where you’re at with the Innovation Hub.

Chris Walton: Yeah. It’s shocking to think I’ve been a full-time union official for forty years now. My background’s really an organizer — trying to grow unions and get members more engaged and active so we can win campaigns. I set up an Organising Works program, a traineeship for organizers in Australia, in ’94, after starting with the bank and insurance unions. That became the training arm of the ACTU — which is like the AFL-CIO or the CLC. I worked a lot with unions so we could get stronger and more effective, and then became assistant secretary of the ACTU in 2002. Ran a few campaigns like Your Rights at Work, where we kicked out a conservative government and the Prime Minister lost his own seat — which was big in our country.

Then I went back and ran a small union. While I was there I realised I was a bit old and backwards in my ways, and that I needed to improve my craft — this little thing, the interwebby, wasn’t going away, as one union official put it. I had to learn digital. And I saw that although there’s no new principle of organizing, campaigning, or unionism, there are some new tools. I had to wake up. We tried a lot of things and it worked. Then I went back to my old mates in the movement and said: look, if we all go one-off, it’s going to be too slow and too costly. So we’re now part of the ACTU — fully owned by the ACTU, fully owned by unions — working together in a user group to get ahead faster and at lower cost.

Riley Miller: That’s kind of foundational with unions, isn’t it — the united front, working together. It plays well.

Chris Walton: Well, we believe in the collective, but we don’t always act collectively. Even simple things — buying power, things we have to purchase — why don’t we use a collective approach? It’s not a new idea in the union movement, this idea of collective. We talk about it, but in Australia, at least, we weren’t really working together on some of these things as well as we could have.

Riley Miller: So touching on that — when it came to the Union Innovation Hub, why did the Australian movement decide it needed a collective approach for digital?

Chris Walton: Well, if you accept digital is part of the future, then how do we get there? We can all go one-off, and we’ve all heard the horror stories — custom builds, multi-million-dollar things that never finish. And it’s pretty mission-critical: at the very least you’ve got to process the fees, let alone the other critical union work — case management, and so on. So we said: if we all go one-off, it’s just going to be too expensive and take too long.

The ACTU backed us to set up the Hub, and it’s an incredibly simple model. We work as a user group. The basic principle: surely unions have at least some common things they all do and have. So can’t we build — with whatever platform we choose — the shared functionality that covers ninety-odd percent of what unions need, still configure it for each union, and customise where we need to? And then have an ongoing user group that shares not only best practice but ongoing improvements — because it should never end, especially with AI now. We came to the view that we needed a new model, we called it the Hub, and it took off. We’ve got about two-thirds of the union movement in Australia and New Zealand now working together. They operate separately, but we’ve got a user group where we can get ahead a bit faster and at lower cost.

Riley Miller: When it comes to coming to the table for input on improvements, or reviewing the technology that’s already been built on the Hub’s foundation — how do new updates get triaged as a group?

Chris Walton: This is a really important question. Every union’s got their own system; we’ve just got a base that lets you get ahead at lower cost. Obviously, if the base meets ninety percent of your needs, implementation costs are smashed — they’re so much lower. And then you’re sharing ongoing improvements. Every quarter, at least, we update and do improvements, and there are constantly new things unions want and need.

If a union wants to go ahead on their own, they can — they can do a custom part. But usually when a union has an idea, we say to the other unions: what do you reckon, are you interested? It’s always opt-in, optional. So either we just do it and it’s shared by everyone, or a union goes ahead and makes the improvement available to everyone, or we do a “pass the hat around” model where the unions who want that innovation share the cost. Or one of our partners, like Bursting Silver, builds an innovation and makes it available. It works really well. You can’t make it all decision-by-committee all the time — a union has to be able to get ahead — but nearly every time, that union makes the enhancement available to other unions, usually at no cost.

Riley Miller: I like that “hat around” approach — put it up to the board and see who else thinks it’s a good idea. That’s really cool. Now, a lot of what we’d like to explore today, at least for our listeners in Canada and North America, is highlighting the differences between how unions in Australia organize versus unions in North America.

Chris Walton: Yeah, they know their system. I’ve been a student of the Canadian system — I went over there in ’96 and did a thorough study, because I’m fascinated by it. I love the Canadian union movement. Your density is still very high compared to a lot of other Western countries, and obviously the US has an incredibly difficult time of it, with union busters and so on. I’ve followed it for many years.

One of the main differences: in Australia we’re all open shop. That is, we have to recruit and retain members as well as engage them and make them active to win campaigns. That’s also the case in right-to-work states in the US, and increasingly that trend is happening there. Thank goodness in Canada — and I hope it stays — you’ve got the Rand formula, so you don’t have the free-rider problem we have. If you get the collective agreement, people pay, and you have less of a retention issue. But as my Canadian friends stress, it’s not enough to have members — they’ve got to be active and engaged members if you’re going to win. Which is why we exist. We don’t exist to get fees in; we exist to make a difference to workers’ lives.

Canadian and US unions have a massive organizing challenge, and a lot of internal organizing — not only to get members active but to retain them. In Australia, one of our good unions has a twenty-five percent turnover of members a year, just because of the churn in their sector — it’s in retail. So you can imagine: you’ve got to sign up twenty-five percent of your members each year just to stay stable, let alone grow. In Australia we’re actually growing at the moment — twelve and a half percent since 2022 — and that’s despite the churn and the need to retain. So most of it’s the same, but we’ve got that extra challenge, as some US unions do, of also having to recruit and retain.

Riley Miller: You call out something important — engagement — and I’ve talked to Al about this too when it comes to association leaders. It sounds like there’s a common thread between Australian and Canadian unions in trying to encourage engagement from their membership. So what kind of levers or techniques should leaders be looking at to encourage that membership engagement?

Chris Walton: Look — whether in Australia, where we need it to retain members, or in Australia, Canada, and the US, where we need it to get active members — engagement is the key. Getting members to move from inactive, or just paying their fees, or not even wanting to be in the union but having to pay, to being active and engaged members — we all know that’s so critical to winning. And to having the power to make a difference, whether in bargaining, in broader campaigns with government, or with the community.

It’s always been thus, and it’s tough. How you move from uninvolved, apathetic people to active members, build up your workplace leader structures, and have members ready to go when they need to withdraw their labour to win — that’s always a challenge. There’s no new principle in it: engage with them around their issues, develop internal leaders who can communicate, and do the education necessary to get collective action. But digital can help. That’s the big thing I learned — no new principles, but new tools.

I can bore you with the things we’re doing and trying, but they work. Being able to identify our workplace leaders and stewards through those who are more active, so we know our warm potential leaders — and in our case, our warm potential members that we sign up. Being able to personalize, be more relevant, have a good user experience for the member, have the data to know where our weaknesses and strengths are. It’s all obvious stuff. Digital just gives us the tools to do it a little more efficiently and effectively — not replacing the fundamental of talking one-on-one or in groups, but helping funnel that activity to where it’s most effective.

Riley Miller: I like that you mentioned user experience. That’s another one Al highlighted. With all the technology we use every day, even on our smartphones — when something isn’t working as you expect, there’s nothing more frustrating.

Chris Walton: And workers — members — will in part judge us on that experience.

Riley Miller: Big time. I want to follow the thread toward the member journey and get your insights from your research. But first — one thing to highlight. In Australia you see twenty-five percent membership churn; in the Canadian model, members don’t actually quit, but they can still become disengaged. Without that metric, you can’t quite tell when people are falling off. So what signals would you encourage leaders to look for?

Chris Walton: This is where the data is so critical. How do we know we’re ready for a fight? Canadian and US unions battle this all the time — we’ve got to know. In Australia it’s a bit more vivid: they can just stop being members. But there’s a range of ways to know engagement. What became clear is the obvious: engagement shows up in activity. It might be opening their member portal, where the content is unique and relevant to them. It might be coming to a union meeting and engaging in it, or seeking support on a workplace issue, or doing an online action. We phone them, they phone us. They help lobby local politicians. They’re on the bargaining committee. Do we track that? We need a system that can easily track it, and we need one source of truth.

Then we use things like engagement scoring. Whatever those activities are — and it might be unique to each union — you put a weighting on them. Opening an email might be one point; leading the bargaining committee, ten; being a steward, nine. You can weight all those activities and actually measure them. In Australia’s case it’s proven that the lower the engagement, the less likely we are to retain them. You might have a retention issue there, but it’s the same principle everywhere: the lower the engagement, the less active, the less likely you are to win. So through techniques like engagement scoring you can spot your at-risk or low-engaged members. Just as importantly, you can spot your very active members who aren’t yet in formal roles — your stewards or workplace reps — and make a beeline for them. And you can use the technology to handle dues collection issues and automate a number of activities to help us do our jobs better.

Riley Miller: It plays well into however they operate. Being able to identify those leaders, especially.

Chris Walton: In unions we want to do a good job — support members, but also empower them so we can win. We’ve always tried in campaigns to measure the level of activity: how many filled in the survey, did the petition — to know whether we’re ready for a fight and not kid ourselves. Those metrics matter for our stewards and workplace reps too, where they share in the goals we’re trying to hit. And you want to break the workplace down into its subsections — a shift, a floor, a department — to know whether you have a contact in each area and what the level of activity is. Roll it up to the whole employer, roll it down to a shift or department. So you’ve got the data to know your levels of engagement — like what percentage filled in the survey or petition in a particular area.

Riley Miller: Speaking to your stewards, and the risk of losing touch by being online — how do you automate member journeys without the union starting to feel like a subscription service, like you just signed up for a website?

Chris Walton: It’s a very good question. In Australia and New Zealand we extensively use member journeys. What’s a member journey? It’s an automation with a trigger point — say, someone joining — and then they’re put on an onboarding journey: a process where they’re contacted over six or twelve months so we make sure they understand all the aspects of the union, why it’s important to be a member, how to be actively involved, and what campaigns the union is running. It’s segmented by industry, sector, career — so it can be personalised. In Australia that’s proven to improve retention. On average a union member in Australia now lasts just over eight years — and that’s with an open shop. So it’s very important to keep that member engaged, and to get them active.

All it is: a trigger point — someone joins. Yes, in that journey you want the steward, workplace rep, or staff rep to chat to them. But you can also build in a series of emails and texts that introduce them to the elements of the union. If they open it, they get the next thing; if they don’t, they get encouraged to. We have member portals in Australia where you get personalised content: “Welcome, hi Chris, here’s the relevant content and news for your workplace, employer, industry, or sector.” I can update my details, and so on. Those journeys make such a difference, Riley — it’s proven.

And coming up to a campaign, we segment those journeys: someone who filled in the pledge or petition gets asked for the next action; those who haven’t get encouraged to do the first one. You’re constantly segmenting. You can do unique ones for campaigns. In Australia, if someone doesn’t finish filling out the join form, you can follow them up automatically — and that’s successful. You can use them for next-best-action: someone’s done something, so you encourage them to do the next thing. It doesn’t replace the fundamentals of face-to-face, but it gives you a real leg up — and the data helps you spot the areas that need more intensive work and your best potential workplace leaders and stewards.

Riley Miller: From my own perspective — if I’m registering for something, I need to know where things are. Having that information available when I sign on goes back to the member experience you talked about. If I’m lost, I’m not going to be a very happy member. If I have to navigate a bunch of places I don’t know, can’t find what I need — where’s the value?

Chris Walton: I’m part of the club. I mightn’t have known I was becoming part of the club — I might just have been active to get it there in the first place — but if I’m part of it, I want to be part of it. Unions want members to feel part of it and get active. So let’s at least help them understand how to navigate what we’re doing and what we’re active in. Staff get very busy with multiple priorities; at least we can have some things always on. And we can use the data from that to focus staff and workplace leaders on the areas that will have the most bang.

Riley Miller: I want to round off the digital side. Engagement is one half of what you’ve said is needed. The other half rests heavily on using digital to organize for growth — in Australia, addressing that churn; in Canada, having a measure of how ready your membership is to organize.

Chris Walton: And in Canada and the US, in organizing campaigns — whether we’re ready to go to certification, whether we’ve got enough cards, whether we’ve got the support, who our leaders are. Very fundamental. I’ve been talking a lot about engagement where we already have members, but in the US and Canada it’s really fundamental to use those techniques in organizing too.

Riley Miller: Absolutely. You’ve highlighted a lot of use cases today around automated processes, and reasons why that’s important while still maintaining the human relationship. Are there other tools at play on the digital front that organizers could use in their workplaces or industries to connect with members?

Chris Walton: We’ve got a number of integrated tools. Obviously we all use surveys, petitions, and other campaign action tools. The importance is that they’re integrated into — for want of a better description — the mothership: your CRM, your membership database, so you know who’s doing things and who’s active. Increasingly it’s getting easier to use digital to build the top of the funnel — the potential member list. If we’re organizing an area, we want people to self-identify as potential members and get them onto a prospects list, then work that.

Here’s a weird one. In my old union we were trying to organize engineers. We put out a summary of graduate rates of pay for engineers and said, “if you give us your name and email, we’ll send you the summary.” We trialed it, and in two weeks three thousand people gave us their name and email. Now, that’s not organizing a union — that’s just getting your starting points. But there’s a range of techniques. Some industries use LinkedIn a lot, and you can talk about mapping the workplace — you go into LinkedIn and there’s a list of names and occupations. I could go on and on. It’s no new principle, just techniques that help us get there a bit quicker. You can put those potential members on a journey too, to see who even opens the email — they might be warmer. It doesn’t replace meetings outside workplaces, but with the data you know where you’re strong and weak, and it helps with rating potential members. We just track it a bit more effectively.

Riley Miller: It’s about having as many insights and signals at your disposal to make informed decisions — and being able to rely on that data. So from what we talked about today, if the leaders listening right now were to take away one principle about member engagement specifically, what should that be?

Chris Walton: I’m sure you’re ahead of where I was as an old union official. I know I have to modernise a bit. I don’t pretend digital is some sort of magic solution — but all digital innovation, at its simplest, is: everything we do, can it be slightly more effective and efficient if we use some digital techniques? We’re going to run a survey anyway — wouldn’t it be handy to automatically know who did the survey, by area, and which potential member filled it in? So let’s embrace digital — not as a whiz-bang solution, but as part of the solution, as new tools. And if we’re going to embrace it, let’s help each other get there quicker: share techniques, share best practice, and get the infrastructure necessary to move faster.

And it’s not only infrastructure — it’s culture. The biggest difference in my old union was “have a go.” I don’t know if that’s a fancy word for innovation, but every now and then there’d be a debate — and the answer was, have a go. Obviously there are some new skills, but they’re not new principles. And make sure you’ve got the technology and infrastructure that makes it relatively easy. That’s what we did with the Hub — we said we’ve got to make sure we have that infrastructure. And that’s now available in Canada and the US, by the way. Our movement here decided that, now that we’ve done this and built this base — we call it Union Suite for iMIS — we should make it available around the world, at least as an option, because Australian unions benefit the more the systems are shared and improved. It’s a mutual benefit. So we decided to do that recently, and we’re working with Bursting Silver in Canada and the US soon.

Riley Miller: “Just have a go.” I look forward to more Australian terminology bleeding its way up to Canada.

Chris Walton: She’ll be right, mate.

Riley Miller: Well, Chris, it’s been wonderful having you. If anybody wanted to follow up for more of your insights, playbooks, and techniques, where can they reach you?

Chris Walton: We’re fully owned by unions — not-for-profit, for unions. Our view is that everything we’ve done is available: all the guides, the how-tos, as well as the actual iMIS for Unions system, now available as a starting point for Canadian and US unions. We want the Hub to be the international hub. We think all unions, including Australian unions, benefit the more that are involved. So talk to Riley, or he can give you my details. We’re in partnership because you need a local partner — we’re not implementing in Canada and the US ourselves, we’re using partners like Bursting Silver. But we’re making everything available as a starting point. Feel free to ask for a demo of what we’ve built. Check for yourself whether it’s useful and whether it meets ninety percent of your needs. If it does, imagine that as your starting point — your project’s cost and risk drop massively. Then you make a judgment. And if you go ahead, we’d love you to be part of the Hub and work with other unions as a user group, so we can all get ahead faster and at lower cost.

Riley Miller: Beautifully said. I’ll keep some links in the show notes to those resources if people want to look further. I know it’s early for you — you’ve probably got a coffee to get to, and I’ve got a dinner to run to. Chris, it’s been wonderful having you on. Thanks again for making the time.

Chris Walton: Thanks, Riley.

Riley Miller: Thanks, Chris. Take care. And a big thanks to Chris Walton for jumping on board — and thank you for listening. If you want any of the resources Chris mentioned, they’re in the show notes below. If you liked what we talked about today, we’re The Modern Membership Org podcast — my name’s Riley with Bursting Silver, and we launch every Tuesday. If you want to subscribe, we’re on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, all of that jazz. Appreciate you for listening, and all the best in your modernization movement. See you next week.