Our members are and must be at the center of all our activities, all our reflections and all our actions. They are the heart and the raison d'être of our union. The Institute's raison d'être is to build community to work together to improve the lives of workers.
Each year thousands of activities are organized by your union in both official languages. The Annual General Meetings (AGM) are more administrative, but many of our activities are aimed at engaging in dialogue with members to educate them on important topics, or are community support activities.
For the first 100 years of the Institute's existence, our techniques of engaging with members were primarily face-to-face; meetings, lunch and learns, conference dinners, get-togethers, hand shakes, meals and promotional products.
The COVID pandemic combined with telework is forcing us to evolve. Society has changed its perception of the social appeal of face-to-face meetings, caused by fears of sanitation and new personal and family values.
Social engagement and volunteering need to be redefined and we need to develop new ways to be relevant to members, for them to identify with our activities, for them to find meaning in their participation.
In recent years, the Institute has embarked on a technological shift in its communications. Email campaigns have had some success, as have lobbying chain letters to members of parliament. Engagement through social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter is becoming increasingly common.
Now we need to think about how to extend this kind of innovative engagement to include the participation of members and of our activists. We need to create new techniques so that members feel useful and valued by making additional contributions to the labor movement. Creating a think tank on new ways to engage members would be required to develop, experiment, and add new ideas to our union toolkit.
