Inside LabourStart

We launched a major new campaign yesterday. The soft launch (appearing on our home page, on the list of active campaigns on our site, via our ActNOW newswire, through our Tweets, status on UnionBook and Facebook, etc.) generated a grand total of 11 messages sent, including my own.  The difference between this and doing a mass mailing is enormous — so let’s not believe any of the hype about alternatives to email.  At the moment, there are no alternatives to email — this is the only effective way to build online campaigns.

Today I’ve sent the campaign, and a reminder to check our recent English language mailings on Posterous, to our volunteer translators, including our new Italian language translator.  I hope to have this campaign, like the previous one, translated into Russian as well.

Book sales have fallen — the sales of Economics for Everyone were a one-off.  Very few people bought either the Silkwood book or the cartoon book we promoted yesterday.  When we have a poor week, the income is really only pennies and we do have to wonder if it’s worth it for us to appear to be commercial when we’re not really making any money.  There is, of course, the educational value of promoting these books and the help we’re giving to UCS, to keep them going.

I’ll be speaking about LabourStart campaigns at a number of events in the next few weeks, including the South East Region of the Trades Union Congress in London this coming weekend, in Leeds and Manchester in the next few weeks (at TUC events), and at the International Metalworkers Federation communicators conference in Frankfurt next month.

As part of the effort to improve our capacity in other languages, I’ve been working with Andy Funnel to completely translate the interface for adding news in the French language for those correspondents who may not read English.  We’re nearly there — we’re working on the names of countries.  Once this is complete, we can do the same for other key languages, which will open the door to correspondents who do not read English.

I’ve been working on the Labour Newswire Global Network — the list of websites that use our newsfeeds — for the U.K.  I’m finding that a staggering number of sites have simply disappeared.  Unions that have merged into other unions — including some very large ones like the GPMU —  have simply given up on their domain names, which I find extraordinary.  Many local union websites have fallen into disuse, or evaporated into the ether.  In some cases, sites went through re-designs and in the process dropped our newswires.  Of the first 58 websites I’ve gone through, only 12 are active and using our newswires.  If this is true across all countries, then we don’t have 750 sites using our newswires — we are closer to having 150.  This means that we will need to seriously promote the newswires, especially the ActNOW one, to boost responses to our campaigns.

Meanwhile, the response to both our Photo of the Year competition and our Twitter survey have been great — much higher than anticipated.  2,833 votes cast so far in the competition with another 11 days to go (we’re already probably higher than we were last year) and the Twitter survey, with two more days to go, already has had 1,552 responses.  (More than two-thirds of the respondents do not use Twitter, by the way.)

I wrote here on Friday pointing out that the size of our mailing lists continues to fall as the number of bounced addresses exceeds the number of new subscribers.

But that’s not the only problem, even if it is the biggest one.

We’ve had problems recently getting the mailings out, waiting several hours last time and again delayed this morning.

As you may know, for more than a year now we’ve been using UnionLists.org.uk as our provider, and we’re paying a lot of money for this service (£720 a year) though this is much less than we paid for the commercial iContact service which we used from 2007-8.

These delays in sending out messages are unacceptable and I’ve written to them about this.

We also have the ongoing problem that many people either do not see the footer on every message telling them how to unsubscribe, or do not understand it, and as a result, every week we get angry complaint letters from readers who want to get off our lists.

It would be better if they all saw an unsubscribe link and could just click on it.

Telling them to key in a certain word (unsubscribe) in a certain field (subject) in an email to a particular address is apparently too complicated.  I spend several minutes every week manually deleting (and in some cases changing the address of) subscribers.

Reading angry, and sometimes threatening, emails, is also no fun.

Any really good suggestions for coping with these problems would be appreciated.

One of the things that is not widely known is that unless you constantly recruit new members to your mailing lists, over time they will gradually begin to shrink.  This is because people’s email addresses change all the time, and once a message has bounced a certain number of times, our software (and any good mailing list management software) removes them from the list.  In the last two months, despite several large campaigns, we’ve seen a net fall yet again of several hundred addresses from our lists, particularly the English list which is far and away the largest.  In fact, the size our lists overall is no larger now than it was at the beginning of the year.  For the latest numbers, go here.

Last year, we got fewer than 3,000 votes for the Labour Photo of the Year competition — the first time we did it.  This year, we got 60% of that number in the first 24 hours.  There is tremendous interest in this competition, which is great — let’s hope we continue to see a large number of votes cast and the involvement of thousands of trade unionists in this process.

I’ve just sent out the mass mailing in English.  You can cast your votes here.  Tomorrow will do more publicity.  Last year we had nearly 3,000 votes cast.   Let’s hope this year is even bigger.

Ainur Kurmanov

We’ve been asked by people from both the IMF and IUF to mobilize support for Ainur Kurmanov and I’ve now taken the first steps in what I hope will be a very large campaign.  These include:

1. Setting up the campaign in English – with text I received from Moscow
2. Sending out a test mailing – to make sure the messages don’t bounce
3. Informing the group in the IMF and IUF that the campaign is live and asking for a Russian version
4. Sending it out for translation into Norwegian, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish and Polish to our volunteer translators
5. Sending out an English language mass mailing to LabourStart’s list [51,040 subscribers]
6. Posting the message to Posterous, and thereby automatically sending it out via Twitter [1,586 followers]
7. Mailing to everyone in our Facebook group [2,025 members]
8. Adding a number of news links relating to the case
9. Asking the owner of the existing Facebook group in support of Ainur to write to all its members [687]

I read a book recently called Twitter Power and it is basically a guide to businesses on how to use Twitter for marketing.  It had several interesting ideas some of which I’ve implemented, and over the last few days (and the next few), I’m trying out a number of third party features they recommended.  Yesterday, for example, I tested Twitpic — a way to publish photos via Twitter.  I’ve shared details of how to do that with Derek Blackadder, who does our daily photo for LabourStart.  Today I tested TwitterCounter This shows that while we are growing, and LabourStart has more followers than 99% of Twitter users, we could grow much faster.  As of this morning, we’re at 1,585 followers.  While this isn’t even close to being as large as our mailing lists, it’s nothing to be sneered at either.  Let’s grow the number of followers.

The joint ITUC-UNI-RENGO campaign for nuclear disarmament is an important initiative.  UNI has asked us to promote the online petition and we’ve done so in today’s mass mailing to our English list.  Originally we learned about this campaign back in May from the ITUC.

Everyone who signs the online petition from today will see a link at the end to sign up to LabourStart’s mailing list, so hopefully this will also help boost our own list in the process.

Best seller

24 hours after making Economics for Everyone our book of the week, we’ve seen 75 orders placed (some for multiple copies) with sales totals (including shipping) reaching US $2,662.

This may be our biggest selling title ever.

In addition to promotion of the book in a mass mailing, Derek did a mailing to his Canadian contacts which certainly helped.  The book also appears on the front page of LabourStart, in our Labour’s Online Bookstore blog, on UnionBook (in the Union Books group, the largest group there), on our Facebook group page, and was promoted via Twitter as well.

One of the nice things we are doing here is making a book that would otherwise have a very limited geographic distribution available to trade unionists everywhere. The first few sales of this book all came from the eastern hemisphere — and it’s unlikely that trade unionists in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands would have ever heard of it if we hadn’t promoted it.

We’ve also discovered that our Polish comrades are interested in publishing a Polish language version of the book — one more unintended consequence of our promotion of these books.

The great majority of new users continue to be spammers and it’s taking a daily effort to ban or delete them.  We were promised a registration plug-in for Elgg by the end of September but that hasn’t happened.  I’ve posted messages to the Elgg community offering to pay for a solution but that hasn’t happened either.  We cannot grow UnionBook until we overcome this problem — and other than trying to find a generic PHP programmer willing to learn Elgg, I don’t have any ideas.  Anyone have a concrete suggestion what to do?