Oct
31
2009
2

682 new subscribers netted through photo of the year comp

Of the 3,185 people who voted so far in our photo of the year competition, more than 20% were not on our mailing list but have agreed to be added to it.  The net gain for our English language is 682 new subscribers.

Interestingly, as these were added in four batches of 700 each (there were around 2,800 who agreed to be added to our list, though most were already on it), we could track how many newcomers were in each batch.  The first group was mostly people who were already on our list, but by the time we reached the fourth group, they were nearly 40% people who came to the competition without having already been on our mailing list before.  In other words, the people who vote last in a competition like this are the most valuable to us — they’re the ones who learned about it, and LabourStart, from somewhere else.

Written by ericlee in: Labour Photo of the Year,Mailing list |
Oct
30
2009
0

LabourStart in Numbers [3]

Here are today’s totals with the change since the end of September in brackets. Mailings lists are declining as bouncing addresses are automatically deleted from the lists.  UnionBook’s growth may be largely due to spammers – but we’re on the case and hopefully next month we’ll see more accurate figures.  Twitter’s growth — nearly 10% in just one month — is very good.

  • Mailing lists – subscribers: 58,237 [-763]
  • UnionBook – members: 4,777 [+238]
  • Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 2,021 [+8]
  • Twitter – followers: 1,715 [+144]
  • Correspondents: 704 [+17]
  • Union group on Flickr: 514 [+23]
Written by ericlee in: Mailing list,Twitter,UnionBook |
Oct
30
2009
0

ICTUR journal to cover our August conference

I was commissioned by the International Centre for Trade Union Rights (ICTUR) to write a short article about our August 2009 conference for their journal, International Union Rights. Here is what I wrote:

(more…)

Written by ericlee in: 2009 conference |
Oct
29
2009
0

From London to Leeds

The British Trades Union Congress (TUC) has invited me to do a series of short talks to trade union reps around the country on the subject of online campaigning.  Naturally, the talk focusses on LabourStart and encourages the reps to get active with our ActNOW system.

Last Saturday I spoke in London to around 100 reps, yesterday in Leeds to around 30 and on Monday I’ll be in Manchester doing it again.  I begin with a show of hands — how many people have heard of LabourStart and seen the website.  In London, the vast majority were familiar with it. In Leeds, a minority.  I’m not sure why this is the case, but it demonstrates the importance of actually meeting people face to face and telling them about the site and the campaigns.

Written by ericlee in: Campaigns |
Oct
27
2009
0

When even daily mailings won’t do …

Following our conference in Washington in August, I decided to follow the example of the DC Metro Labor Council and move from weekly (or less frequent) mailings to daily (if needed).  I thought that in doing so, we could focus each mailing on one subject, which is known to be much more effective than mailings that cover a number of topics.

We have been mostly successful with this, but today is an example where we cannot do it.  The IUF’s victory in its Casual-T campaign targetting Lipton / Unilever is obviously hugely important and they want us to tell everyone about the win.  The RMT in the UK has asked us to promote again the Eurostar campaign which is now leading to more strikes.  We’re in the final days of the Labour Photo of the Year competion and do need to send out at least one more reminder to boost participation.  And we’ve been trying for the last few weeks to promote book sales and we’ve had a book of the week to push.

That’s already four things we needed to tell our lists and there will certainly be more tomorrow and the day after.

Obviously, we’re not going to do more than one mailing a day, but we should be aware that the goal of one message, one topic may become increasingly unrealistic.

Meanwhile, only one person of the 60,000 or so on our lists has written to suggest that we’re sending out too many messages and should return to the weekly mailings.  Certainly there are others that feel this way, but to have gotten only one complaint is actually quite encouraging.

Written by ericlee in: Mailing list |
Oct
26
2009
0

Mailings to our list – inactive languages

I’ve sent out a reminder to our translators in Norwegian, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Polish and Italian, as I now do every week – but this time pointing them to this page rather than Posterous, which is incomplete.  Some of the mailing lists have been relatively inactive — the most recent mailings went out as follows:

  • Polish – 13 July
  • German – 31 July
  • Spanish – 14 September
  • Dutch – 5 October
  • Italian – 12 October
  • Norwegian – 20 October
  • French – 21 October
  • English – 23 October
Written by ericlee in: Uncategorized |
Oct
23
2009
2

Labour Newswire – Lessons from the UK

More than a decade has past since we launched the Labour Newswire.  As union websites told us they added the newswire, we added them to our global directory.  The problem is, we don’t know when those sites remove the newswires or if the sites themselves disappear, and we don’t always know when new sites start using the newswire.  Which is why we need to go through the directory from time to time and clean it up.

I’ve just completed the clean-up of the UK section, which has dropped from 124 to 35 sites.  If this is true for most countries, then the actual number of websites using our newswires is closer to 200 than to 700.

The good news is some very large and important sites continue to use our newsire in the UK, such as the UNISON national and Scotland regional sites, and the national websites of PCS, TSSA and USDAW.  (Napo has temporarily taken the newswire down from its national site, but the General Secretary assures me that it will soon go back up.)  The popular TUC’s UnionReps.org.uk site continues to use it.  The health and safety newswire is particularly successful.

My next task is to start visiting UK union websites which do not use our newswire and get them to do so.  If any of you can do the same with your countries, it would be appreciated.  (I know that Stuart is working on the USA.)

Written by ericlee in: Newswires |
Oct
23
2009
0

Twitter survey results

I’ll soon be sending this out to our list. Here they are.

Written by ericlee in: Twitter |
Oct
22
2009
1

TUC aggregator for union press releases – a tool for correspondents?

John Wood of the TUC writes:

The TUC now has a simple aggregator for union press releases at www.unionnewswire.org.uk. It’s very much in beta (meaning it’s likely to fall over at a moment’s notice), but could be a useful tool to save LabourStart correspondents interested in the UK a little time in searching round union sites.

It uses a service called Dapper.net to make RSS feeds for sites that don’t have them yet, and a modified implementation of WordPress.org to automatically bring together 19 feeds in one place, and output a common listing as a web page, RSS feed, Twitter feed or email alerts (daily digest), so you can get the news in the format you like.

Unfortunately this is still only a very partial picture. A couple of unions in the UK display their press releases in formats that a scraper can’t understand, so can’t be syndicated, and almost half the UK’s unions (mostly the smaller unions who may not be so active in media work) don’t publish press releases on their sites at all.

For interested nerds, the whole thing is built in the open source CMS WordPress, using the excellent Feedwordpress plugin. Some unions that publish their press releases online but not yet by RSS are also included, thanks to the RSS scraping service open.dapper.net. Feeds that don’t quite fit are modified in Feedburner.com and/or Yahoo Pipes. Twitterfeed.com takes the combined RSS feed and publishes it onto www.twitter.com/unionnewswire

As all these tools are free or open source, the service only costs the price of a domain name and a shared hosting account to run (around £20 a year). I think aggregators may become useful tools for unions, helping us to share information around the movement for little cost, or to build instant portals with new views of a topic out of different types of information source – providing a useful service and a natural meeting point for people with any given interest, all under the banner of the union.

Written by ericlee in: News database |
Oct
21
2009
1

Email promotion pays off – Iraq campaign takes off

As I pointed out yesterday, there’s nothing like email to promote a campaign.

Using our newswires, Twitter, our website, etc., we managed to get about 11 messages sent in the first 24 hours this campaign was online.

In the last 24 hours, since our mass mailing went out (in English, and then later in the Scandinavian languages), we’ve gotten 1,821 messages sent.

So we can say that email is about 180 times as effective as any other tool we have to promote campaigns.

Let’s hope this helps persuade the Iraqi government to back off.

Written by ericlee in: Campaigns,Mailing list |

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