Custom software for trade unions and member associations

UA Local 52's 505 active members needed access to their critical standing — amount owed and worker classification such as Journeyman or Apprentice — without calling the Union Benefits Administrator during office hours. Members' cell phones are preregistered, so there is no app, no password, and no internet access required. A member texts a single word (STATUS, DUES, COVERAGE, PAY) to a Twilio number and a small PHP service looks them up by mobile number and answers from the union's existing records. It works where they work.

The platform serves 505 active members, averaging 97 unique members using it each month, and inbound calls to the Union Benefits Administrator dropped as members self-serve around the clock. The call-reduction outcome is stated qualitatively because the union did not run a formal call-volume study, and the case study does not pretend otherwise.

UnionVision is a research and analytics platform that applies machine learning to member engagement data, surfacing churn risk and actionable outreach signals, and contributed to a 22% reduction in member churn through early intervention workflows. What makes it possible is not the modeling but the data: 500,000 work-transaction rows accumulated since 1999 in the union's member hour-bank system, a system Mindfulware's founder originally built.

Twenty-seven years of continuous, consistent records is a training corpus most organizations cannot buy, and it existed because the 1999 system was built to last. Union member data is small, sensitive, and personal: every model output touches a real member or contractor, so results have to be explainable to the leadership who act on them. And the signal is buried in simple records — member number, contractor number, work date, hours worked, amount paid — where churn risk hides in the patterns across rows, not in any single field. The platform computes a risk-of-churn percentage for each member, giving leadership a heads-up on who needs a call so issues get addressed before they escalate and a member leaves the union.

The pattern behind both systems is one you can apply to any member organization: work with the records the organization already has, deliver signal through the channel members already use, and stay explainable to the leadership who will act on the output. GoLocal52 uses SMS because it works on the job site. UnionVision uses hour-bank records because they are the truth of what members actually do. Neither system asked the organization to collect new data or adopt a new tool, and that is why both are still running.