UniVox CRM: How We Built a Purpose-Built Union Management Platform
The project built a purpose-built union management platform for a growing automotive trade union. With anonymous voting, organized member groups, and a member-facing portal, it gives leadership full operational control while keeping every member informed, organized, and involved.
Technology
Digital Platform for Union Member Management
Outstanding work and an excellent collaboration. Robert and the Enlivy team delivered a modern platform that exceeded our expectations. The system makes it easy to manage members, organize union groups, communicate with members, and run internal votes and elections. Communication was fast, the development process was flexible, and every suggestion we had was carefully analyzed and implemented. The final result is even better than we initially imagined, and if we had to start again, we would definitely choose Robert and Enlivy once more.
Romeo Miskolczi
This video review was provided in March 2026. We had the pleasure of collaborating with Romeo on this project.
Overview
UniVox Automotive is a trade union in active growth, managing hundreds of members across multiple factory locations, sectors, and organizational groups. Like many unions, their operations had outgrown their tools; what worked when they were smaller was now a bottleneck.
Enlivy delivered a purpose-built union management platform covering everything from member approvals and group organization to anonymous voting and email notifications, all from a clean, modern interface that both administrators and members could actually use.
Client Objective & Challenges
UniVox came to Enlivy not with a technical specification, but with a clear picture of what wasn’t working.
Their existing WordPress setup could store member records and handle basic status changes — and not much else. There was no way to filter or search members meaningfully, no structure for organizing members into groups, and no mechanism for conducting the votes and elections that are a core part of how a union operates. Every process that required more than a basic record lookup had to be handled manually, outside the system.
Their core needs:
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A modern, filterable member registry with approval workflows and role-based access
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A Union Group system for organizing members into groups, with capacity controls and leader assignments
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A secure, anonymous voting system for statute ratifications, elections, and internal approvals; at group level or union-wide
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Internal news and email notifications to keep members informed
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A member-facing portal where members could log in, read news, join their group, and cast votes
Finding a vendor who understood both the technical and organizational requirements wasn’t easy. After evaluating several proposals, the union chose Enlivy. As the client put it: “Robert saw further than our requirements, and came with proposals that exceeded our initial imagination, but fit exactly what we needed.”
Translating Client Needs into Technical Solutions
At Enlivy, we don't just execute, we translate business goals into precise, high-impact solutions. Through our initial conversations with the UniVox team, we identified not just the surface-level requests, but the real workflows underneath them. One meeting of about an hour was enough to map the full scope, because the client brought problems, not feature lists.
How We Solved the Problems
Login That Works for Every Member
Union members aren’t daily users. Many would log in for the first time in months to cast a vote or read an important announcement, and a forgotten password would stop them cold. We designed around that reality from the start.
The primary login method is a 6-digit magic code sent to the member’s email. They enter it in the browser, this means no clicking a link, no password to remember, no friction. It works in every email client, including those that don’t render clickable links properly (a real issue discovered during development with one of their members).
Password login remains available as a secondary option for those who prefer it. Security is layered throughout: rate limiting on login attempts, automatic temporary lockout after repeated failures, and a login flow that never reveals whether a given email address is registered, protecting the privacy of the membership list.
Anonymous Voting With No Exceptions
For a union, vote secrecy isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a legal and ethical requirement. We designed the voting system so that anonymity is guaranteed at the data layer, not just in the interface.
When a voting session opens, each eligible member receives a ballot record. When they vote, only the aggregate totals are updated, the ballot record is deleted. No table, no query, no database access can reconstruct who voted for what. The secrecy is structural.
Sessions support multiple questions per ballot, optional rich-text descriptions per question, answer shuffling, and audience targeting; so a vote can be sent to all members, or restricted to a specific location, sector, or group. A live audience count preview shows exactly how many members will receive a ballot before the session goes live.
The Process
Discovery: One meeting. That was enough to capture the full scope, because UniVox brought real operational problems to the table, not a feature wishlist. We identified needs the client hadn’t yet articulated, and the project kicked off immediately after.
Within days of starting, the first working builds were in the client’s hands. As the union leadership described it: “The interface surprised us — how easy it was to work with from the beginning.”
Once the team started using the platform in real workflows, new requirements emerged naturally. Some things worked differently than expected; others sparked ideas that hadn’t come up in the initial meeting. We reviewed every proposal, explained how it could be implemented, and delivered demos for confirmation before building.
Core Components:
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Member Management
A complete member registry with role-based access, advanced filtering, private notes, and export tools.
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Union Groups
Organize members by location and sector with group leaders, capacity limits, and self-service joining.
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Anonymous Voting system
Run secure union votes with targeted audiences, automated notifications, and anonymous results.
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Internal News & Notifications
Publish union announcements with rich-text editing and automatic email notifications to members.
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Member Portal
A simple portal where members can update profiles, manage groups, read news, and vote.
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System Health Dashboard
A real-time overview of platform health with status indicators and quick administrative actions.
Member Management
A full member registry with multi-level role access: Members, Managers, HR, Executive Bureau roles (MBE, SEF, SEC, VIP, PRE, CEN), and Administrators, each with appropriate permissions.
Management can filter the member list across 7 dimensions simultaneously, sort every column, and arrive at a precise list in seconds. Filters persist in the URL, so sharing a filtered view is as simple as copying a link. A sticky column design keeps the ID and action buttons visible when scrolling wide tables.
Union Groups
Groups are the organizational backbone of the union. Each group carries a Location and Sector classification, a configurable member capacity, and an assigned leader. Members can join and leave groups themselves from their profile page, leaders excepted. When a member’s location and sector match a group’s, that group appears in their available options automatically.
Management has full group administration: create, edit, set capacity, assign leaders, add or remove members in bulk. Groups are filterable by location and sector on the group list page, and each group card displays its classification with colored badges.
Voting System
The voting module handles the full lifecycle of a union vote: creation, activation, ballot distribution, member voting, reminders, and results.
Sessions support multiple questions, each with optional rich-text description and per-question answer shuffling. Audience filters restrict ballot distribution to specific locations, sectors, or groups, with a live count showing how many members qualify before activation.
Once active, eligible members receive an email notification and can access their ballot from the member portal. The reminder system lets management resend notifications to members who haven’t voted yet, with a 60-minute cooldown between sends, a confirmation modal showing the exact recipient count, and a preview of the email being sent.
Results display aggregate counts only, never individual choices.
Internal News & Notifications
An article system with rich-text editing (Trix), author selection (useful when a manager publishes on behalf of someone else), and automatic email notification to all members on publish.
Email previews are clean and readable: up to 5 formatted paragraphs, with images and file attachments stripped out. A “read more” prompt appears only when the article is longer than the preview, otherwise it omits it cleanly.
The platform makes it simple to add, update, and manage courses, providing educators with the tools needed to deliver a comprehensive investment education program.
Member Portal
The member-facing side of the platform gives every member their own space. From their profile page, members can:
- Update their email and volunteer status
- See their current group with location/sector badges, leave it if needed, or join an available group
- Access the news feed
- Cast votes on any active ballot
The experience is intentionally simple, members who log in infrequently should be able to do what they came to do without confusion.
System Health Dashboard
A management-only page showing the state of the entire platform at a glance. Eight check categories: Environment, Database, Email, Queue, Scheduler, Cache, Storage, Application Stats, display color-coded status dots with a summary bar across the top.
Where something is fixable, an inline button appears: “Run migrations,” “Clear failed jobs,” “Clear log.” The migration check is smart, it compares migration files against the database and surfaces any that haven’t run yet, so nothing gets missed silently.
Results & Impact
After implementation, the new platform delivered measurable impact across every area the client identified as a challenge. What started as a basic record-keeping system became the operational backbone of the union: managing members, organizing groups, running votes, and keeping the entire membership informed and engaged.
- Store records and change statuses
- No voting capability
- No email notifications
- No visibility into student progress
- Not enough visibility into system health
- Full CRM: approvals, filters, exports, notes, activity log
- Union Groups with capacity control, leaders, and self-service joining
- Anonymous voting with audience filters, reminders, and per-session analytics
- Members log in, read news, manage their group, and cast votes
- Tracked, idempotent email delivery at scale; with full journal
- Real-time health dashboard with inline fix actions
Lessons Learned and Challenges
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Design for the real user, not the ideal one.
Union members log in infrequently. Building authentication around that reality — a code instead of a password, sent fresh each time — removed the single biggest barrier to participation. Adoption followed naturally.
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Anonymity has to be structural, not cosmetic.
Hiding vote choices in the interface isn’t enough. The only trustworthy anonymous voting system is one where the data itself contains no link between a member and their vote. That’s what we built.
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Email at scale needs architecture from the start.
A background job per recipient, controlled delivery rate, skip-if-sent guards, and per-member tracking aren’t premature optimizations — they’re the minimum viable approach when your audience is thousands of people.
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One meeting, done right, eliminates months of back-and-forth.
The full project scope came out of a single hour-long conversation. Clear questions, a client who brought problems not features, and a team willing to think beyond the brief. The rest was execution.
Conclusion
We started with a union that had outgrown its tools and needed a platform built around how they actually operate, not a generic solution adapted to fit. The CRM we delivered in a matter of weeks transformed their day-to-day operations: member approvals that used to require manual workarounds now happen in seconds, groups that existed only on paper are now managed digitally, and votes that required external tools are now conducted securely inside the platform.
The anonymous voting system gives members genuine confidence in the process. The notification infrastructure keeps the entire membership informed at scale. The member portal turns passive record-holders into active participants in their own union.
Most importantly, the platform was built to grow. UniVox is already collecting ideas for the next phase, and we’ll be there for it.
