Organise

We want every person to be able to see the bigger picture about their life at work, and use their power to fix the problems that affect their working lives. Crucially, we want to have a million members in the UK within three years, and at the five year mark, we'll be at the million member mark in dozens of countries. By reaching this level of scale, we'll be able to help people aggregate their experiences across sectors and with international colleagues. Using big data to give predictive access to justice at work.

Our distributed petition, survey and diary app allows anyone to collect data, build their workplace network and advocate for change at their work. We put power back in the hands of workers to solve their own problems and improve their lives and the lives of their colleagues. Traditionally, people would look to trade unions to take collective action, but with an increasingly atomized workforce and the demise of the union movement, no-one was using technology to facilitate worker-led advocacy. Organise changes this.

The problem:

Most people don't have any way to improve their situation at work, despite liking elements of their jobs, there are parts that frustrate them that are difficult to change.

Our solution:
Our suite of tools gives power back to people. Using our petitions and surveying platform people build networks advocating for change and our TakeNote app to access justice when something goes wrong.

Our users come from all walks of life, we see a lot of users from the 'gig economy' because our platform gives them a way to take collective action without having to be in the same physical space. For example we recently had 200 female uber drivers use our platform to collect their own data and advocate for a new feature within the uber app which would boost their income and safety at work. They're in discussions with uber about how to roll out their idea in a pilot. Without Organise they'd never have been able to team up, and get heard at the highest levels in such a digital organisation.

Anyone who takes part in an Organise campaign joins our community. This means we scale as more and more campaigns are hosted on our site. Each time someone signs a petition or takes part in a survey, they're a potential new catalyst for change - building the confidence to start a campaign inside their own workplace. Because our tools are distributed, it allows us to automate a lot of the functions, and help millions of people use the tools without relying on a back office team to manually support each campaign.

We're the only organisation of our kind in Europe. It gives us a strong advantage, as we've had the space to build out our tools as we want rather than in a race against competitors. As such, we've expanded our tools to include our anti-harassment app - something that wasn't on our original road map, but a tool that our users told us they need to win change at work. We've got a strong vision for the suite of tools we need to build to equip our users in the digital economy, and our competitive advantage is that our users drive the development of Organise. They understand Organise has no direct policy agenda, it's driven by our users just as our tools are. It's what makes us powerful.

So much Tech. At the core of our organisation is our actions platform. This allows people to start and run their own petitions and surveys. Beyond that, we have a bespoke CMS we built to optimise collective action. We use AI and machine learning to analyse our survey results, allowing us to spot patterns and help people team up at scale. We've also built an app to allow people to store sensitive legal data on their phone without uploading it all to the cloud (elements of it will be cloud based - but there are legal complications about uploading company data to another site, eg. incriminating harassment emails).

Ours is a reader focused theory of change, our users pick the issues and write the calls to action in their language. We've seen dozens of petitions and surveys that as a staff team, we don't understand, but they speak to workers' issues and galvanize huge networks of workers. This is what makes our solution powerful powerful. Organise is about distribution of power, we don't represent workers - we give them the tools (network and confidence) to represent themselves. It's helping users build power for themselves, and that's why it will create so much structural change and long-term impact.

We have 68,000 active members. We run a weekly survey about how our members are experiencing work. In the workplaces where they have run a campaign to improve things, we see a marked improvement in their enjoyment of work - even if they don't win! Hundreds of thousands of people have won change using Organise. Including Tesco temporary staff who won a change to how they're paid, Ted Baker staff who challenged a culture of sexual harassment and ITV staff who won a significant bump in their Maternity pay. We want 1 million users by the end of next year, and 1 million in a dozen countries at the 5 year mark.

Our success is focused on our impact. Our main goal is to win at least 1 campaign a month. Beyond that our goals are growth (hit 1 million users) and financial sustainability (grow our takenote revenue).

The biggest risks to Organise are that we don't scale fast enough, or we face competition from similar companies. 

The core of our impact and power comes from collective action, the bigger our collective, the more action and change we can drive. If lots of similar copycat technologies spring up, as a sector we'll divide the users and weaken their power inadvertently. That's where having modular technology and the ability to license it could give us not only a competitive advantage, but also the ability to scale up worker's skills and the tools they can access to get justice at work.

Organise has four staff members. Founder Nat Whalley got the idea for Organise when a friend of hers was made redundant just after she'd become pregnant. She teamed up and started to draft a crowdfunder to pay her friend's legal fees to challenge the decision. The threat of this crowdfunder got her, and her friends' job back, and 5 months full paid maternity leave. She saw the potential for people to team up and win better rights and benefits at work by standing together and taking action.

Organise is based in London, and operates across the UK. Longer term we'd like to move to a remote team, spread across the multiple countries our users will be based in. Given all our tools are digital and accessible from anywhere, we feel our team should be the same!

Nat Whalley - CEO and Founder. BA in Politics from University of Warwick. A decade of professional digital campaigning experience. 

Matt Parsons - Developer. PhD in neuroscience from the University of Cambridge. Previously co-founder of smart-home energy app. Matt leads the development of our technology with a speciality in dev ops.

James Rees - Developer. MACantab in Maths and Philosophy from University of Cambridge. Back-end and database specialist, he's our AI specialist.

Usman Mohammed - Campaigner. MMath from University of Manchester. Campaigner with a flare for maths, he is a natural organiser and leads the coaching of people using the Organise tools, building their confidence. 

One of the FT and Google's European Digital Champions 2018

Future of Work Award 2019

We've also been featured in a LOT of press for our impact. I'll go bold and say possibly every news outlet in the UK and most of them in the states? You can see a good list at the bottom of our homepage here:
https://www.organise.org.uk/

We think this recognition and press profile has helped us be the number 1 ranking on google for 'start a campaign'. Which is helping to supercharge our mission as a good 20% of our campaign starters come via google.

We're an awkward hybrid at the moment. We're a social enterprise, and the TakeNote app is our route to financial sustainability. It's legal dashboard will have a B2B subscription as well as taking a cut of legal winnings. But to date we've taken on investment and received several grants as our social impact is very high. Longer term, we're also looking to white-label the TakeNote app and sell it to unions and professional associations to support their workplace efforts.

We're in talks with the BMA (British Medical Association), the UK's doctors union about white-labelling a version of TakeNote. This would open up a whole new market of licensing our technology to existing unions, while we continue to serve sectors without representation.

We expect to continue our hybrid approach to funding to support our scale up, relying on donations and grants, selling services as well as raising investment capital from social impact investors.

Being selected as a Solver would help scale up our distributed campaigning suite. While we have an algorithim to support our weekly survey, our members don't have access to this yet. We also need to automate a lot of the blast functions of a campaign (whatsapp, SMS and email blasts that our users can send to people in their network). Our techie is only two days a week, so the majority of this prize would be spent on bringing him on full time (HOORAY) and supercharging our tech stack for our users.

Our AI is pretty primitive in it's current iteration. We use AI to look for illegal workplace practises and tell our members when they might be able to get legal redress for a workplace problem. We also use syntax analysis to look for people who are having similar problems at a shared workplace, and so we can link them up to take collective action to fix it. With the prize money we'd be able to scale up the volume of active users (and data), feeding our AI and crucially building out a system that allows our members to utilize it directly. At the moment, our staff team are loading the data, and looking at the results. Then manually communicating with affected users. This kind of prize money would allow us to automate a lot fo this process, giving us a much quicker route to scalable predictive access to justice at work via our AI.

Our users come from all walks of life, we see a lot of users from the 'gig economy' because our platform gives them a way to take collective action without having to be in the same physical space. For example we recently had 200 female uber drivers use our platform to collect their own data and advocate for a new feature within the uber app which would boost their income and safety at work. They couldn't get heard in traditional employee voice channels because Uber drivers are predominantly male, so the staff surveys and feedback mechanisms leave women drowned out in the volume.
They're now in discussions with uber about how to roll out their idea in a pilot. Without Organise they'd never have been able to team up, and get heard at the highest levels in such a digital organisation. We'd love to expand our support to help women be heard at companies across the UK and beyond.