What's in the Organise toolkit?

Petitions 📝

Petitions are a great way for you to gather supporters behind a specific demand. A petition proves that lots of people support the change you want.

Here are some examples:

• Force energy companies to put customers before profit
• Make it illegal for employers to keep workers’ tips!
• Protect our legal right to strike!

Here’s our guide on how to write a great petition.

Open Letters 📄

Open letters build support by asking people to add their names to a public letter that lays out shared concerns, experiences and a demand for action. Open letters are public so they put the spotlight on the person they’re addressed to. Clever, eh!

Take a look at these examples:

• Protect Black Women in the arts
• AnyVan: pay your drivers fairly

Ask a question 🤔

Asking a question is a really great way to get feedback from other workers or gather insights from our million-strong network on the issues that matter to you! People are free to write their own thoughts so it’s a great way to get lots of rich information and insights.

You could ask questions like:

• What are your views on the recent pay rise?
• Have you experienced more hostility or abuse from customers in recent months?
• Do you think we’re paid what we’re worth?

Run a snap poll 📊

A snap poll is the fastest way to test the water and get people’s views on a subject that means a lot to you. You can see if other people are thinking the same about an issue at work, vote on what to do together next, or sense check your thinking with other people in the Organise community.

Check out these examples:

• Would you consider rejecting the current pay award to get an improved offer?
• What do you think a Green New Deal would do for workers?
• Do you think NHS staff should get a pay rise at least in line with inflation?

Send an update 📣

The people backing your action are what makes it powerful. So regularly contacting your supporters is a really important part of running a successful action. There are lots of reasons to contact your supporters, and you can never really send too many updates!

For instance, the organiser who started this campaign wrote an excellent update to his supporters:

This petition is getting attention – thanks to everyone who's backed it! 15,000 have signed this petition in 24 hours and have left over 1,000 comments. It's great that it's striking a chord. Please share it with your network. This is an opportunity to apply some pressure!

Tactics to help you win your campaign

Build a survey 💌

If you have more information you need to gather from people at your workplace, you can create a survey with some Organise staff help. This is most effective when you have a specific issue at work and you need to see how it’s affecting people, in a safe and confidential way. You can build a report with your survey answers and deliver it to your senior management, for them to understand the scale of the problem.

For example, an Amazon worker started a survey to see if other associates had seen perfectly good items being destroyed in the warehouses. Through this, they discovered it was a nationwide issue so they started a petition which got 80,000 signatures – and won!

Similarly, workers at a small charity started a survey to better understand the toxic work culture and mismanagement from the CEO. 16 people completed the survey, we handed a report into the trustee board, and the CEO later resigned.

And Ted Baker workers surveyed their workforce to see if people had experienced sexual misconduct from the CEO. Turns out, it was a huge issue with many victims. The CEO was forced to resign when the workers went public.

This feature is coming directly to members soon; in the meantime, get in touch if you’d like to build a survey, by emailing action@organise.network.

Ask your supporters to email their government representative 📮

Once you’ve got some support behind your campaign, you can ask your supporters to email their local government official to bring their attention to the issue. This means you get potentially hundreds of MPs or representatives learning about the campaign and hearing the demand for change.

The Organise staff team can build a template for you to send to your supporters – drop us an email if you’d like to use this tactic, on action@organise.network.

Get press attention 🗞️

Getting attention from the media can really rocket your campaign up the agenda of government officials or your senior management – not all publicity is good publicity!

If your issue is about a local or regional workplace, your local press might want to know about it. Drop them an email with the story and see if they’d like to cover it. If you’d like to get national press coverage, just drop us an email on action@organise.network.

Plan a social media stunt 🤳

Coordinating your social media efforts into one big hit can really help to get your campaign trending and noticed. Update your supporters on Organise and ask them to tweet or post about the campaign at a specific time, using a specific hashtag, to see if you can build more support from the public.

Hand in your campaign 🎁

And ultimately this is what it all leads up to! Your action with Organise is a means to an end: making change at work by persuading those in power that they need to do something. So don’t forget to send or present your action to the person that’s responsible for making the change.

You can send a petition or open letter to your CEO, board of trustees, or the relevant government official. Or if you’ve made a question or snap poll, you may want to draw up a quick report with the findings. Drop us an email if you need help handing in your action, creating a report, or staying anonymous – we’re on action@organise.network.

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