What Union Leaders Say When No One Is Pitching Them

A few months into conversations with union leaders across the country, a pattern showed up that we wouldn't have expected.

You show a local five problems that Forge is built to solve. You ask which ones resonate. And more often than not you hear: "All of them."

That answer doesn't come from a prospect who's agreeable. It comes from a local running lean, managing more than their staff was built to handle, and looking across a slide at a list of things that have been on their plate for years. It is not surprising that all five land at once. For most locals, they do.

We've been in conversations with more than 100 locals since the spring, from large building trades councils in the Midwest to public sector unions on the coasts to small manufacturing locals down south. What we've heard across all of them has shaped how we think about what Forge is built to solve.

The Problem Is Never the One You Lead With

Every first conversation covers similar ground. We show the five core problems: white-noise communications that don't reach the right members, administrative burden that falls on people who are already stretched, pressure to grow membership in a competitive labor market, difficulty mobilizing members, and gaps left by international tools that weren't built for how locals actually operate.

"All of them" is common. So is "the first two are big for us," or "getting members to mobilize." It may be any combination of the five. What stays constant is the follow-up question we've learned to ask: "Tell me more about that."

What follows surfaces the real problem they face. And even though the roots of the problems are similar, the real driver of the issue is almost never the exact same for each union.

It's the secretary-treasurer who manages 70 contracts for 1,300 members across four counties and still drives to each hall to post physical flyers when she needs to get something out. It's the training director whose apprenticeship program has tripled in size while staff stayed flat, and who now has rooms full of new apprentices losing their health and welfare paperwork. It's the office manager who spends two hours a week answering the same question on the phone because members don't know where to go to access their benefits.

The surface complaint is usually something like "we need better communications." The real problem underneath is usually about accountability: how do you know anything actually reached the person it was meant for?

What 'Posting at the Barn and Crossing Your Fingers' Actually Costs

One of the more memorable lines we've heard in a first conversation: "We post at the barn and cross our fingers." It was said without irony, by a leader who knew exactly what it meant and had accepted it as the cost of doing business.

This is not a small local problem. We've heard versions of it from locals with several thousand members. The blast goes out: email, text, a letter to the membership roll. Then there's silence. No visibility into who opened it, who clicked, who showed up because of it. The feedback loop is either no response or a complaint.

What union leaders are describing is a targeting problem. The message went to everyone, which means it went to no one in particular. The apprentice in their first year received the same contract update as the journey worker two years from retirement. The healthcare worker received the same updates as the retail branch of their union. The member who is current on dues received the same reminder as the one who is not.

Over time, members learn to sort union communications into the same mental folder as everything else that's not quite for them. The local works harder to reach them; members get better at filtering it out. The solution most locals are looking for is precision.

The Membership Problem Has a Clock on It

The administrative and communications challenges are real. But the thing that comes up with the most urgency, particularly in the building trades, is membership.

Locals in Indiana expect to need roughly 1,000 new members across six councils by next year. Industrial work is driving demand faster than the pipeline is producing it. Applications in some locals dropped by half in a single year, not because interest collapsed but because the people who were supposed to apply never made it through the door. They were coming straight from high school, shaped by what they'd seen about trades work online, and nobody with the right message got to them first.

What makes this acutely relevant to a technology conversation is that the solution isn't more outreach to the same people. It's the ability to reach a specific audience (young workers, high school seniors, parents asking about apprenticeship) with a message built for them, through the channels they actually use, and to know whether that message landed.

Locals that are winning on membership aren't always the biggest or best funded. They're the ones who figured out how to show a 22-year-old pipefitter apprentice exactly what joining this local means for them, in a format that fits on a phone screen.

The Real Hesitation Is Not About the Software

Somewhere in every first conversation, after the five problems have landed and the demo has run, the real question surfaces. Even if the features and the pricing are a good fit, none of that matters if nothing changes after the contract is signed.

"If my members don't use this, what happens?" It's asked in different ways, but the intent is the same. The executive board is going to ask. The stewards are going to ask. And the leader sitting across from us is asking on their behalf.

Union leaders have seen platforms get approved, bought, and forgotten. The adoption story that gets told is usually: training happened once, in a session that half the stewards couldn't make, and six months later the system is something the staff uses occasionally and the membership has never touched. What comes next is the harder conversation about what was spent and what it produced.

Every local that asks "what happens if this doesn't stick" is asking because they or someone they know has lived that outcome. The question is a fair one. My colleague Matt wrote about what successful rollouts take just a few months ago. It deserves a real answer, not a feature comparison.

The locals where first conversations have become working partnerships are the ones where we talked about rollout before we talked about pricing, where we asked about the steward network before we showed the admin dashboard, and where the question "what does success look like at 90 days?" had a real answer on both sides.

The Conversation Worth Having

If you are a union leader who has been in a technology conversation that felt more like a presentation than a dialogue, you already know what was missing. The vendor covered features. You had a problem. The two did not fully connect.

The conversation worth having starts where the real pressure is right now. Not the general challenge of member engagement, but the specific thing costing your staff time they do not have. The specific segment of your membership you are not reaching. The reason you are still posting at the barn and crossing your fingers.

When that conversation happens first, everything that follows is easier. The demo is shorter and more relevant. The board presentation is cleaner. The rollout has a real plan underneath it.