Apr
28
2011
2

Annual May Day appeal

Today we begin our annual May Day fundraising appeal.  I’ve created a new set of web pages for this purpose, here and am about to begin publicity.

Last year we did very well from 1 May right up until our conference (raising money for both).  Last year we raised over £6,500 in May alone – let’s see if we can beat this now.

Written by admin in: Fund-raising |
Apr
28
2011
0

It’s Workers Memorial Day, so …

… let’s promote this.

Written by admin in: Newswires |
Apr
27
2011
0

Shit – our first spammer …

UnionBook suffered its first spam attack today, as reported to me by a number of users – and which I spotted myself as I received quite a bit of the spam. I immediately shut down the account and banned the spammer. I posted a notice on top of UnionBook explaining what happened. I will be emailing everyone who wrote to me about this.

But how did this happen in the first place?

We approve every new member of UnionBook by hand – and if someone doesn’t put in a genuine union name, we block them. In some cases, the people may be genuinely interested in UnionBook, but it’s supposed to be for trade unionists, so to prevent spammers we have been extra cautious and basically kept out everyone who didn’t seem to be real.

In this case, I believe the spammer managed to put in a genuine union name when registering and was approved.

Remember that the approval process also requires them to use a genuine email address and (I think) pass a CATCHA test as well.

All we can do is be even more careful in the future …

Written by admin in: UnionBook |
Apr
26
2011
0

Turkey – Reform labour laws campaign now closed

The campaign reached 2,647 messages sent after 3 months online (207 of those messages were sent in Turkish).  I am now writing to DISK to try to find out what the impact of the campaign was.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Apr
22
2011
1

Our first-ever campaign in Arabic!

Thanks to our new translator, Qassim – http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/solidarityforever/show_campaign.cgi?c=907

The little green flag is actually this.

Written by admin in: Campaigns,Internationalization |
Apr
21
2011
0

Swaziland: New campaign launched

This is the second campaign the ITUC gave us this week – we actually received both within 10 minutes of each other, but have agreed with the ITUC that we could wait a couple of days to launch this one. Please do help spread the word about this one as well.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Apr
21
2011
0

Bahrain campaign taking off …

We’ve had 3,124 messages sent in the first 40 hours. In the English language campaign, we’ve had 704 messages sent from the USA, 593 from the United Kingdom, 525 from Canada, and 373 from Australia. The campaign is also now live in French, Spanish, German and Italian. We have also received the translation into Arabic which I hope will go live today. This is a very good start for this campaign and let’s hope we can quickly break through the 5,000 mark so that this will be one of our large campaigns.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Apr
20
2011
0

Moshrefa Mishu (Bangladesh) campaign suspended

We’re suspending this campaign and have asked SOLIFONDS to tell us what the result of the campaign was.  

With 4,766 messages sent, it was our largest campaign in nearly a year.

We will be suspending all our campaigns after three months, and the next one to go is the Turkey – Reform labour laws (next Tuesday) followed by Pakistan – Reinstate sacked unionist and Turkey – Polyplex (both on 9 May), and Mexico – Defend trade union rights (10 May).  In other words, 5 campaigns are closing over this 3 week period – leaving only two live campaigns on that date.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Apr
19
2011
0

Bahrain campaign launched

The ITUC has given us the green light and we’ve gone live with the campaign:

http://www.labourstart.org/bahrain

Can this be the first LabourStart campaign to break 10,000 messages sent?

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Apr
19
2011
1

Tuesday morning updates in brief

  • Mailing lists: I continue the process of migrating our mailing lists over to MailChimp – all languages except for the Scandinavian ones and French are currently in progress. Today I set up mailing list sign-up forms which are links on our pages in Spanish, Turkish, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Arabic, Finnish, Russian, Chinese and Polish. The only languages that remain to do are the ones with much smaller lists – Farsi, Vietnamese, Bulgarian, Czech, Creole, Greek, Esperanto, Indonesian, Georgian and Hebrew. Translators will need some help in using MailChimp and I will attend to that before we do our next mailing.
  • Campaigns: We expect to launch the Bahrain campaign later today.  I had a long discussion last night with the IMF about doing some large scale campaigns in the near future. The Our Campaigns page (see link in the upper right corner) now goes back to early 2007.  We will need to find summaries of what happened – especially in cases where we won.
Written by admin in: Campaigns,Mailing list |

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