CAIWU Consulting

In 2022 I did pro bono tech consulting for the Cleaners and Independent Allied Workers Union in the UK. CAIWU represents the cleaners and workers in the service industry- notably those working at the campuses of the tech giants like those that I work for.

CAIWU didn’t have a scalable solution for growing its membership. It was bottlenecked on updating its website, on storing its member data, on contacting its members, on its internal email hosting. None of its internal software tooling was self-service for users without a background in development, and they were receiving quotes far outside the union’s budget to install and migrate to a new CRM.

First I did a full audit of all CAIWU’s existing tech stacks, and research into the most cost effective and best fitting solutions for them. 

I found them a suitable CRM, migrated them to third-party email hosting (from their native web hosting’s limited email service) with their custom domain name, set them up to redo their website using self-service WordPress templates in a staging environment, and wrote a migration plan for the new system.

I was also on hand to help with the final switch over to the new services, once they had been fully prepared for the migration. This pattern of turning down old services and safely moving to new ones is something I did often in my role at Waymo, and I was glad to learn how to apply the principles outside the proprietary Google infrastructure.