Social Change Online's first UK Union website named TUC 'Website of the Year'

The annual Trades Union Congress Press & PR awards in the UK this week named as "Best Union site" the website built by Social Change Online for the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (USDAW).

The USDAW website

The website, located at: http://www.usdaw.org.uk, was launched in 2003.

According to the union, the site has already had over 180,000 visitors who have viewed more than one million pages.

It has played a big role in recruiting new members to the union, with one of every 165 visitors to the site completing the online form to join.

Impressive

USDAW General Secretary John Hannett praised the website as "impressive" and called it an example "of the considerable and ongoing success that USDAW is delivering".

Best Campaign

In addition to winning the website award, the union's "Freedom from Fear" campaign won the best campaign award. Mike Glover and Nicola Williams of the union's communications department accepted the two awards at a ceremony in London.

The competition judges wrote that Usdaw "won the day with their clear, user-friendly, engaging site. 'Ask Jan' is a good tool and well presented."

They added that the Usdaw site was "perhaps the most approachable website of all the entries" and that this fact, "together with solid, practical content, clear and colourful presentation, and excellent functionality, gave it winning appeal."

While Social Change Online is relatively new to the British trade union scene, it is in fact the world's leading designer of trade union websites. Based in Australia, the company has produced hundreds of websites for the leading trade unions in that country and New Zealand, as well as a large number of government and non-profit organisation sites.

Social Change Online's recently appointed UK representative is Eric Lee, the author of "The Labour Movement and the Internet: The New Internationalism" (Pluto Press) and founder of LabourStart, the online trade union news service.