A member of the union, Comissions Obreres (CCOO) Catalunya was fired from their position for organizing a strike. The CCOO needed to respond but didn’t want to run a petition, it needed to be an escalation.
The below article is a blow by blow of the rapid response campaign that followed.
A large public company recently fired one of their workers after she held meetings with her colleagues to organize a strike for better working conditions at the upcoming America’s Cup where they were expected to work extended hours. The employer also fired one-third of the workers for doing just a 1-hour strike.
One of the fired workers was also a member of the CCOO union in Catalonia (Comissions Obreres). The union wanted to respond to the situation as fast as possible by running a campaign using knowledge gained from the European Center for Digital Action’s (ECDA) Digital Organizing trainings.
When deciding on a rapid response tactic they realized first a petition was not the right response for such an outrageous act of union bashing - it simply did not fit the gravity of the situation, so they considered a Twitter and LinkedIn storm campaign targeting the company. Their idea was to use SoSha (a social media engagement tool) to get their members to post and share the news on these social media with mentions targeting the employer's different profiles.
It turned out that the employer didn’t have a Twitter profile, only a LinkedIn one. This reduced the chances of getting enough results, as much fewer people have LinkedIn accounts than Twitter/X accounts.
The CCOO team decided to launch a Letter Campaign via ActionNetwork targeting the employer. A Letter Campaign is a feature in ActionNetwork that lets you create a landing page where supporters can easily learn about an issue - in this case, an unfair dismissal for engaging in union business and then take action by writing directly to the target. Supporters can send a pre-written email, an editable draft or their own personal words straight to the target. The target - The Director of Human Resources has their inbox flooded by messages from union members and supporters..This tactic ensured everybody could participate in the action (no need for a social media account), and it could also bring in new supporters via an organic social media daisy chain action (although it was not the main goal).
It’s up to the organizer whether to let activists edit the letter themselves, pre-write it for them, or provide guidance and prompts that help the supporter craft their email. By using this feature via ActionNetwork, supporters can easily take direct action, while CCOO can assess the collective impact.
Campaign
The description, banner, and title were set up for the Letter Campaign on ActionNetwork. The team also wrote a pre-written letter specifically to the head of Human Resources at the BS:M. This same person was defined as the target of the Letter Campaign. The form asked for nothing more than name, email, and zip code, making it easy and fast for someone to take action without writing an entire email. The less you ask for in a form, the more results you will get.
The letter was not able to be edited by users by design and this was made so to make it even easier. As mentioned, the fewer options you give, the more conversions you will get.
A SoSha toolkit was created with only one post to share on WhatsApp. WhatsApp is Spain’s most used social platform for messaging. The CCOO’s own experience using SoSha in Spain is also that WhatsApp is by far the platform that gets the most shares and clicks over other social platforms. The post included a personal and simple message with the CTA, The posts would be shared by supporters to their personal contacts. Hence so the tone should be warmer than if it was posted on a public social network wall like Facebook or Twitter.
The SoSha landing page was displayed to users immediately after they sent the letter from ActonNetwork, leveraging that they had just taken action on the issue and were more receptive to take another action.
Statistics
From a database of 85,000, 6,000 supporters took action. This means the head of Human Resources received 6,000 emails from different people opposing the dismissal. These are outstanding results for a high-bar action like a letter campaign, as it is not anonymous.
Of the 6k people who took action, 500 were new contacts in the database. The kicker email increased the total open and click rate by +25%.
SoSha got 1,500 shares and reported nearly 400 clicks, which was the cause for the 500 new contacts on the campaign. SoSha increased the actions taken by 10%.