Sep
22
2017
0

A very busy season for online campaigning as we launch 3 new ones

This is the first update in more than two weeks — this was due to my week-long visit to Georgia to launch my book, The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution, 1918-21.

Campaigns:
We have just launched a new campaign at the request of PSI, in support of a trade union leader in Colombia.

We expect to shortly launch two more campaigns at the request of unions in Egypt and Canada.

We closed one campaign — Freeport Indonesia — that ran for more than three months. This was one of our largest campaigns ever, with nearly 15,000 supporters, many of them from Indonesia.

Our translators are struggling to cope with the load of many simultaneous campaigns and for some of our key languages — the ones with large mailing lists — we are falling behind. I have noted that some of our translators always come through on time, even when we are given four campaigns in as many weeks, and written to those to thank them for their effort.

Mailing list:
We added just 70 new campaign supporters in the last two weeks.

Website redesign:
Our friends at Outlandish, the north London web design workers’ coop, have been doing some work for us (on a pro bono basis) and we expect to hear shortly what they have done so far.

Burma/Myanmar:
We’ve begun the process of changing the country name, first in English. At the moment, both names work and soon searching for one will also show results for the other (in a few days).

Georgia:
I was invited to address the congress of the Georgian Trade Union Confederation and did so last week.

India:
We’re working to build closer links with one of our correspondents who’s created a Facebook page for Indian labour news that has 12,000 followers.

USA:
Derek has been making a huge effort to grow our Twitter feed here.  We’re up to 1,145 followers.

LabourStart TV:
We fixed our home page to highlight when a story is a video — even when it’s a top global news story. There is no longer a need for correspondents to include the word ‘video’ in headlines; but do make sure to tag such stories as videos (on the second screen, when adding news).

UnionBook:
Finally, we are done with this, no longer paying for the domain name.

Jul
01
2017
0

LabourStart TV revived

LabourStart TV:
We now have a Facebook page  to help promote our videos (and the web page itself); at the moment Derek and I are the administrators and we can add videos, but others are welcome to join us. The page has 146 likes at the moment, but this will grow quickly.
The page on LabourStart itself has been turned into a live feed of all news stories using video — in English only, but with a plan to roll this out for all other languages shortly. A lot of old stuff has now been removed from that redesigned page.

Campaigns:
We have been approached about a possible campaign in support of Chinese workers in Saipan.
I’ve also had to do a slight design of how we use campaign images on the LabourStart home page; for some languages, that had meant a blank left column — this is now fixed.
We’ve been offered a chance to try out something called PostBug which will allow some campaign supporters to send a paper version of their protest message by snail mail, through a website.

UnionBook: At their request, we have transferred the entire archive to the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam.

Indonesian: I continue to pursue translators to ensure that we can regularly translate our campaigns and mail to our Indonesian language list — our third largest list.

Esperanto: The magazine of SAT, the global left-wing Esperanto movement, has sent me some interview questions. They will shortly be running an article about LabourStart.

Correspondents: We’ve added another new correspondent from India.

Mailing lists: We added 199 addresses this — 66 of those to the English list, 22 to the Dutch, and 111 to other lists. This is four times as many people as we added to our lists last week.

Site redesign: We have a meeting scheduled with our friends at a workers’ coop in London which has offered to help us out with this. More details soon.

Jun
16
2017
0

Thanks to our latest campaign, a massive Indonesian language mailing list

Campaigns: The new campaign on Indonesia very quickly became one of our largest ever, with 12,000 supporters after little more than a week online.
After three months online, we closed the campaign in support of TUMTIS members in Turkey with the approval of the ITF. It was one of our largest, with more than 10,000 supporters. The workers’ leaders remain in jail and the struggle continues.
We fixed one of the landing pages in Russian which was not rendering correctly.

Mailing lists: We imported 6,483 new names this week — probably a record for us — and the vast majority are from Indonesia. These names will be added to our small Indonesian list which now needs to be revived, with a new translator.

Facebook: We’ve launched a 4-week long promotion of our new UK page. In the first few days, we grew our audience by more than 40%, from 521 to 741. We expect to soon have more than 1,000 followers.

Arthur Svensson prize: As the winners last year, we were asked to make a video for the presentation of the award to a South African union this year, and have done so. The ceremony in Oslo is today.

UnionBook: The International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam has asked for, and received, the full archived contents for their use.

Labour Newswire Global Network: This is the page where we list all the websites that run our news and campaigns (using JavaScript or RSS) — and now we’re going to add the option of state/province in some cases. (We have quite a few Canadian union websites using our newswires.)

New flyer: We have the text of our new flyer ready, and have approached a graphic designer we used previously to complete the work.

Donations: In addition to the £8,000 raised from individual donors, we have received commitments from the Education International, the International Transport Workers Federation and IndustriALL this week.

Dec
02
2016
1

LabourStart in Numbers – June – December 2016

Some highlights:

* Note that this report covers a six month period as we missed our September report.
* Good news on traffic to the website – very big gains in traffic to both the news and campaigns sites. Over 61,000 unique visitors to news site was a gain of nearly 50% compared to the first half of the year.There was an even bigger gain for the campaigns site.
* There’s been a very significant growth in interest in our news site in India.
* While most of the mailing lists either stayed the same size or shrunk, the Portuguese language list stands out for having grown by 36% in the last half year. Also our Brasilian presence on Facebook has shown enormous growth.
* Once again, the Canadian Twitter feeds in English and French have grown dramatically, while the USA Twitter following remains quite small.
* Of the five top campaigns in this half year, two came from the International Federation of Journalists (our first campaigns ever with the IFJ) and three of the five are currently active campaigns.

Mailing lists

English: 86,697 – 88,242
French: 8,929 – 8,791
German: 5,997 – 6,021
Spanish: 5,525 – 5,531
Turkish: 4,314 – 4,268
Korean: 4,170 – 3,965
Italian: 4,021 – 4,044
Norwegian: 2,681 – 2,701
Russian: 2,444 – 2,449
Dutch: 1,720 – 1,774

Swedish: 1,242 – 1,235
Chinese: 1,112 – 1,112
Polish: 798 – 798
Portuguese: 647 – 475
Finnish: 638 – 687
Japanese: 518 – 518
Arabic: 418 – 478
Indonesian: 346 – 346
Hebrew: 284 – 296
Tagalog: 254 – 254
Farsi: 231 – 242

UnionBook

UnionBook was closed in 2016.

Linked In

LabourStart group: 2,044 – 2,012

Flickr

Union group on Flickr: 821 – 806

Website

Correspondents: 845 – 826

LabourStart.org (news)

Unique users – 61,279 – 41,506

Top countries (by sessions):

USA 23% – 23%
Canada 14% – 15%
UK 13% – 12%
India – 6%
Australia 5% – 5%

Most popular pages – page views:

Home page – English 51,618 – 34,337
USA – English 21,045 – 8,294
Canada – English 10,210 – 6,297
India – 11,069 – 1,807
Home page – Norwegian 4,091 – 2,746

LabourStartCampaigns.net (campaigns)

Unique users – 56,270 – 37,851

Top countries (by sessions):

UK 15% – 16%
USA 13% – 14%
Canada 9% – 10%
Germany 5% – 7%
Belgium 5%

Most popular pages – page views:

South Korea: Release jailed trade unionists, respect workers’ rights – 8,969
Iran: Freedom for teacher union leader Esmail Abdi – 8,940
Korea: Don’t let Han’s death be in vain – 8,659
Turkey: Press freedom is essential for democracy, set journalism free! – 8,651
AFP: Demand fair terms for freelance photographers – 8,153

Twitter

English: 16,922 – 16,188
Canada English: 6,404 – 5,661
Canada French: 1,633 – 1,071
USA: 639 – 608
Italian: 475 – 458
Indonesia: 365 – 368
Swedish: 374 – 356
French: 230 – 225
Portuguese: 191 – 92
German: 92 – 91
Spanish: 71 – 73
Japanese: 21 – 22
Russian: 18 – 18

Facebook

Like LabourStart.org page (English): 11,990 – 10,528
Members of LabourStart group: 8,388 – 8,521
Friends of LabourStart Brasil: 3,232 – 1,681
Like LabourStart page (French): 551 – 535
Like LabourStart page (German): 478 – 472
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 177 – 175
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 155 – 155
Members of LabourStart Vostok (Russian): 89 – 109

Sep
14
2016
0

UnionBook is no more

unionbookI have completed downloading as much of the content as I can, have written to all members of UnionBook, have instructed Ning that we do not wish to renew for $1,200, and have prepared a landing page for people going to UnionBook.org (which isn’t yet working for some reason).

UnionBook, launched in its current form in December 2008, is no more.

Written by admin in: UnionBook |
Sep
08
2016
5

UnionBook – the end?

Yesterday I posted this message on the UnionBook website and sent a very similar message to all 5,943 users by email:

The company which hosts this service has just DOUBLED their prices, effective immediately.  

This means that LabourStart now needs to pay nearly $1,200 a year for a service which was costing us $600 a year until now.

Because of this, and because there appear to be very few active users of UnionBook, we are thinking of closing down the service.  

If you or your union or organization are prepared to donate $1,200, we can continue for another year.

Alternately, if we see a sudden huge show of interest in the site, we will reconsider.  (That doesn’t mean five people like it — it means enough people to justify spending that kind of money.)

I apologize for the short notice, but we just heard this and have only days to decide.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

– Eric Lee, LabourStart

Written by admin in: UnionBook |
Jun
02
2016
--

LabourStart in Numbers – March-May 2016

Some highlights:

* Significant growth to the English and Turkish mailing lists.
* Slow growth on social networks except for the LabourStart Brasil Facebook presence, which grew by nearly 50% this quarter.
* 24 new correspondents – on average, 2 new ones per week.
* Significant growth in traffic to our news website with 10,000 more unique users than in the previous quarter.
* Our campaigns site also experienced significant growth, with nearly 38,000 unique visitors in this period.
* Downloads of our Android app have slowed dramatically, and fewer people are using it than in the past.

Mailing lists

English: 88,242 – 85,445
French: 8,791 – 8,438
German: 6,021 – 5,870
Spanish: 5,531 – 5,455
Turkish: 4,268 – 3,722
Italian: 4,044 – 4,029
Korean: 3,965 – 3,965
Norwegian: 2,701 – 2,736
Russian: 2,449 – 2,438
Dutch: 1,774 – 1,774

Swedish: 1,235 – 1,255
Chinese: 1,112 – 1,112
Polish: 798 – 798
Finnish: 687 – 687
Japanese: 518 – 518
Arabic: 478 – 450
Portuguese: 475 – 468
Indonesian: 346 – 346
Hebrew: 296 – 286
Tagalog: 254 – 254
Farsi: 242 – 242

Social networks

Twitter followers

English: 16,188 – 15,817
Canada English: 5,661 – 5,207
Canada French: 1,071 – 956
USA: 608 – 582
Italian: 458 – 448
Indonesia: 368 – 368
Swedish: 356 – 345
French: 225 – 226
Portuguese: 92 – 71
German: 91 – 90
Spanish: 73 – 74
Japanese: 22 – 22
Russian: 18 – 18

Facebook

Like LabourStart.org page (English): 10,528 – 10,319
Members of LabourStart group: 8,521 – 8,572
Friends of LabourStart Brasil: 1,681 – 1,198
Like LabourStart page (French): 535 – 500
Like LabourStart page (German): 472 – 462
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 175 – 168
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 155 – 151
Members of LabourStart Vostok [Russian]: 109 – 89

UnionBook

Members: 5,929 – 5,915

LinkedIn

LabourStart group: 2,012 – 1,996

Flickr

Union group on Flickr: 806 – 802

Website

Correspondents: 826 – 802

LabourStart.org (news)

Unique users – 41,506 – 31,026

Top countries (by sessions):

USA 23% – 25%
Canada 15% – 16%
UK 12% – 11%
Australia 5% – 5%
France – 4%

Most popular pages – page views:

Home page – English 34,337 – 37,618
USA – English 8,294 – 2,788
Canada – English 6,297 – 2,129
India – 3,853 – 1,098
Home page – Norwegian 2,746 – 2,309

LabourStartCampaigns.net (campaigns)

Unique users – 37,851 – 21,763

Top countries (by sessions):

UK 16% – 15%
USA 14% – 14%
Germany 7% – 10%
Canada 10% – 9%
France 5%

Most popular pages – page views:

Uzbekistan: Defend human rights activist Uktam Pardaev – 12,011
Colombia: Free academic and unionist Miguel Ángel Beltrán – 10,780
Peru: Union organizer expelled – 8,497
Gambia: Justice for Sheriff Diba – 8,233
Turkey: Support the union members fighting to save the forests of Cerattepe – 4,939

Android app downloads (totals)

First number is current, second number is total installs. The numbers in brackets are from the previous quarter.

English: 370 / 795 [387 / 757]
Norwegian: 41 / 49 [38 / 48]
Esperanto: 25 / 105 [33 / 99]

Total: 436 [458] current installs

Mar
03
2016
4

LabourStart in Numbers – December 2015 – February 2016

Some highlights:

  • Nearly 900 new subscribers on our Korean list
  • Hundreds of new followers on Twitter, on several lists
  • The emergence of major new presence on Facebook for LabourStart Brasil
  • Big gains in traffic to both the news and campaigning websites

The second number is the previous quarter (if we have it); some lines are particularly interesting and have been highlighted in green.

Mailing lists

English: 85,445 – 85,588
French: 8,438 – 8,325
German: 5,870 – 5,785
Spanish: 5,455 – 5,448
Italian: 4,029 – 3,970
Korean: 3,965 – 3,068
Turkish: 3,722 – 3,719
Norwegian: 2,736 – 2,782
Russian: 2,438 – 2,433
Dutch: 1,774 – 1,774

Swedish: 1,255 – 1,256
Chinese: 1,112 – 1,103
Polish: 798 – 793
Finnish: 687 – 687
Japanese: 518 – 488
Portuguese: 468 – 416
Arabic: 450 – 463
Indonesian: 346 – 346
Hebrew: 286 – 282
Tagalog: 254 – 254
Farsi: 242 – 242

Social networks

Twitter followers

English: 15,817 – 15,395
Canada English: 5,207 – 4,962
Canada French: 956 – 876
USA: 582 – 563
Italian: 448 – 421
Indonesia: 368 – 360
Swedish: 345 – 306
French: 226 – 229
German: 90 – 90
Spanish: 74 – 76
Portuguese: 71 – 47
Japanese: 22 – 21
Russian: 18 – 18

Facebook

Like LabourStart.org page (English): 10,319 – 10,177
Members of LabourStart group: 8,572 – 8,611
Friends of LabourStart Brasil: 1,198
Like LabourStart page (French): 500 – 483
Like LabourStart page (German): 462 – 447
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 168 – 169
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 151 – 148
Members of LabourStart Vostok [Russian]: 89 – 82

UnionBook

Members: 5,915 – 5,909

LinkedIn

LabourStart group: 1,996 – 1,970

Flickr

Union group on Flickr: 802 – 791

Website

Correspondents: 802 – 798

LabourStart.org (news)

Unique users – 31,026 – 22,366

Top countries (by sessions):

USA 25% – 29%
Canada 16% – 15%
UK 11% – 9%
Australia 5% – 5%
France 4%

Most popular pages – page views:

Home page – English 37,618 – 41,764
USA – English 13,089 – 13,941
Canada – English 7,616 – 6,294
India – 2,444
Home page – Norwegian – 2,309 – 2,807

LabourStartCampaigns.net (campaigns)

Unique users – 39,304 – 35,723

Top countries (by sessions):

UK 15% – 17%
USA 13% – 14%
Canada 12% – 16%
Germany 6% – 5%
Belgium 5%

Most popular pages – page views:

Egypt: Torture and murder of Giulio Regeni – 13,011
China: Free jailed labour activists, stop suppressing labour organizations! – 6,692
Israel/China: Stop governments’ deal to import bonded workers – 6,324
Djibouti: Teacher trade unionist sentenced to prison – 6,213
Iran: Detained teacher unionist on hunger strike – 5,166

Android app downloads (totals)

First number is current, second number is total installs. The numbers in brackets are from the previous quarter.

English: 387 / 757 [408 / 721]
Norwegian: 38 / 48 [37 / 43]
Esperanto: 33 / 99 [30 / 88]

Total: 458 current installs [475]

Dec
02
2015
0

LabourStart in Numbers – September-November 2015

Growth is indicated below in green, and declines in red.  The second number, where available, is from the previous quarter.

Android app downloads (totals)

First number is current, second number is total installs. The numbers in brackets are from the previous quarter.

English: 408 / 721 [428 / 686]
Norwegian: 37 / 43 [33 / 31]
Esperanto: 30 / 88 [28 / 76]

Total: 475 current installs [489]

Mailing lists

English: 85,588 – 85,962
French: 8,325 – 8,299
German: 5,785 – 5,793
Spanish: 5,448 – 5,462
Italian: 3,970 – 3,998
Turkish: 3,719 – 3,755
Korean: 3,068 – 2,996
Norwegian: 2,782 – 2,749
Russian: 2,433 – 2,384
Dutch: 1,774 – 1,775

Swedish: 1,256 – 1,239
Chinese: 1,103 – 1,103
Polish: 793 – 734
Finnish: 687 – 687
Japanese: 488 – 483
Arabic: 463 – 463
Portuguese: 416 – 373
Indonesian: 346 – 346
Hebrew: 282 – 282
Tagalog: 254 – 254
Farsi: 242 – 242

Social networks

Twitter followers

English: 15,395 – 14,881
Canada English: 4,962 – 4,613
Canada French: 876 – 803
USA: 563 – 524
Italian: 421 – 330
Indonesia: 360 – 341
Swedish: 306 –
French: 229 – 225
German: 90 – 75
Spanish: 74 – 76
Portuguese: 47 – 8
Japanese: 21 – 21
Russian: 18 – 19

Facebook

Like LabourStart.org page (English): 10,177 – 10,078
Members of LabourStart group: 8,611 – 8,526
Like LabourStart page (French): 483 – 478
Like LabourStart page (German): 447 – 433
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 169 – 165
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 148 – 145
Members of LabourStart Vostok [Russian] – 82

UnionBook

Members: 5,909 – 5,885

LinkedIn

LabourStart group: 1,970 – 1,948

Flickr

Union group on Flickr: 791 – 790 [updated numbers not available]

Website

Correspondents: 798 – 789

LabourStart.org (news)

Unique users – 22,366 – 18,711

Top countries (by sessions):

USA 29% – 27%
Canada 15% – 15%
UK 9% – 8%
India 5%
Australia 5% – 6%

Most popular pages – page views:

Home page – English 41,764 – 33,294
USA – English 13,941 – 14,883
Canada – English 6,294 –  6,543
Home page – Norwegian – 2,807 – 870
Home page – Indonesian 2,576 -1,401

LabourStartCampaigns.net (campaigns)

Unique users – 35,723 – 39,436

Top countries (by sessions):

UK 17% – 15%
Canada 16% – 19%
USA 14% – 15%
Germany 5% – 6%
Australia 5% – 5%

Most popular pages – page views:

UK: Support strikers at the National Gallery in London – 8,819
Estonia: Reinstate Sergey Mastepan – 8,493
Kyrgyzstan: Stop union-busting, reinstate Zhanaydar Ahmetov – 6,991
Korea: Stop attacks on trade unions now – 5,778
Libya: Protect female activists now! – 5,737

Oct
26
2015
--

Campaigns supporting workers in Estonia, Turkey, India, Yemen, Israel, etc.

Most of the work in the last 13 days has focussed on campaigns:

  • We launched a new campaign at the request of the ITF, in support of workers in Estonia.
  • We’re keeping our Turkey/Mulberry campaign live at the moment at the request of IndustriALL pending some developments there.
  • I wrote to Sharan Burrow at the ITUC offering our help in growing the joint campaign with the ILO “50 for Freedom”. She replied and is happy to have our help.
  • We gave extensive publicity to the IUF’s new PepsiCo campaign on our home page, to our mailing lists, and on social media.
  • We received a campaign request from WAC Ma’an in Israel; this is on hold pending developments in the region and we also await a reply from the Histadrut.
  • We gave publicity to an IFJ campaign in support of kidnapped media workers in Yemen on social media.
  • I completed work on the new Translations Dashboard which is being used by our volunteer translators. It shows who is translating our campaigns, and prevents duplication of effort.

In other news … (more…)

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