Comms with members

But one of the things I'm interested in is to kind of explore how we know that what we do works.

I mean, for example, from my point of view, one of the podcasts we recorded on the Manston situation a couple of years ago ended up getting quoted by MPs in a debate in the House of Commons.

So we knew that they'd been listening to the podcast and that we were influencing their thinking.

I think that was a significant moment because we thought, hang on, we've got an impact here perhaps wider than we thought.

But But how do we know that what we do works? I suppose, perhaps Neil, your best place to give an overview on that.

Ultimately, we know what it works when we deliver, we help the union deliver for its members.

And, you know, if you look at the last while, we saw things like the campaign for PAVA to be introduced into the state being successful, the stab vests and slash vests being introduced.

There's going to be a pilot for tasers.

There's been, you know, reasonable, I would say, not enough, but reasonable pay increase a few years back.

This year's certainly not a pay increase that we want, but the union will continue to campaign on that.

The membership, the POA, is increasing in different sectors, like the private sector, immigration services and the like.

And another real evidence of the union's campaign at work was the winning the exemption on visas for the overseas prison officers.

So these are things that show you that the campaigns that the union is running are being successful and we're helping deliver for members.

There's a lot more to do, a hell of a lot more to do, but we can see that there has been successes.

Sure.

And I mean, Tom, I suppose in some cases, this is an easier question for you to answer than the rest of us because you'll have metrics showing the increased use, increased reach of various social media tools and website access.

Yeah, that's right.

I mean, I was saying about way back when, when we had a couple of hundred visitors per month on the POA website.

But it's interesting to see that compared with what we're doing today.

So I think in the last year, just some of the metrics, just in terms of our video views, we've increased by 70% up to over 40,000 views.

For things like social media, our engagements have increased in the last year by over 150%.

So I think we're up to just over 60,000, 61,000 engagements.

And then just social media in general, we've doubled it.

I think we've more than doubled it in the last year.

We're up to 5 million views over the last year from just under 2.5 million.