May
16
2011
2

LabourStart makeover, 150 campaigns, and Istanbul update

  • The British magazine .net selects a website every month and has a major design company suggest a makeover. In the June 2011 issue, that site is LabourStart (I suggested it to them). The company doing the makeover suggestion is an award winning studio.
  • The last 150 campaigns we ran are now listed in the Our Campaigns page.
  • My meetings in Istanbul last week around our upcoming conference were successful. I was also interviewed for the new Turkish satellite TV channel IMC, which wants to broadcast the conference live. Nearly 20 people attended the conference organizing committee meeting at the headquarters of the oil workers union – which is where the conference will take place. I’ve done a very basic flyer about the conference which will be distributed at the European Trade Union Confederation congress in Athens this week.
Written by admin in: 2011 conference,Campaigns |
May
11
2011
0

Two weeks into our May Day appeal – some preliminary results

We’ve had 76 donations from 9 countries totalling £2,295.75.

This is slightly more money than we raised last year by this stage in the appeal – but fewer donors (last year we had 98 donors by this point).

The average donation this year is £30.61, which is considerably higher than where we stood last year at this point.

Here is the breakdown of donations by country (in pounds sterling):

  • UK £897.00
  • USA £442.95
  • Australia £425.96
  • Canada £280.67
  • Germany £179.54
  • Other £69.63 (Belgium, Korea, Spain, Taiwan)
Written by admin in: Fund-raising |
May
10
2011
0

New campaign launched in support of Iraqi unions

In our first new campaign in three weeks, we’re responding to an appeal from the Iraqi unions.  The campaign has a short and memorable URL: http://www.labourstart.org/iraq

This is not the first campaign we’ve run in support of the Iraqi unions — so let’s see if we can do better than before.  Here is what we’ve done so far:

  • Iraq: Minister closes all union offices in Saddam-style move – TUC/GFIW – 23 July 2010 – 3,100
  • Iraq: Stop harassment of oil union leaders – Solidarity Center – 12 April 2010 – 2,643
  • Hands off the Iraqi Teachers Union! – TUC – 26 February 2010 – 328
  • Iraq: Stop government interference in the unions – GFIW – 19 October 2009 – 2,530
  • Iraq: Teachers union faces threat of government takeover – ITU – 27 March 2009 – 4,468
  • Iraq: Raid on trade union offices – GFIW – 1 March 2007 – 3,068

Let’s see if we can do better than that March 2009 effort, aiming to get over 5,000 messages sent this time.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
May
10
2011
0

Conference preparation – meeting in Istanbul

I’ll be going to Istanbul on Thursday to meet with our Turkish partners. I have a fairly long agenda, including the following:

  • Timetable for conference
  • Plenaries – speakers
  • Workshops – subjects, speakers
  • Interpretation
  • Costs and fundraising
  • Hotel for foreign guests
  • Evening activities – walk, cultural events
  • Conference website – including Turkish version
  • Registration procedure – also in Turkish
  • Logo, banner
  • Formation of a conference committee – other partners in Turkey

So far, 186 people have expressed an interest in attending, according to the Facebook page for the event, with 60 of them saying they will attend for sure.

Written by admin in: 2011 conference |
May
09
2011
0

Three campaigns closed – and an anniversary to make us think

I’ve just closed down 3 campaigns that had been running for three months with no results:

Turkey: Polyplex must reinstate sacked workers, negotiate with union – 09 February 2011 – ICEM
Company (Polyplex)
1,961 (all languages)

Mexico: Defend trade union rights – 10 February 2011 – IMF
Government
3,677 (all languages)

Pakistan: Reinstate sacked trade union leader at Syngenta – 09 February 2011 – ICEM
Company (Syngenta)
4,398 (all languages)

(There is reason to believe that the numbers for the third campaign are somewhat inflated by over-enthusiastic supporters.)

In another two days, we commemorate one year since the launch of the last campaign we ran that exceeded 5,000 supporters. In other words, we’ve now had a full year without a large campaign. Any thoughts on what we can do?

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
May
06
2011
0

Two new UK-only campaigns launched

We’ve been asked by UNITE and by the RMT to do two campaigns that are not global but are UK-only.  You can see them on our UK news page, and we will promote them to the 5,000+ UK names on our mailing lists.  The campaigns are:

If these work well, we’ll be able to similar campaigns for specific countries (though the USA remains a problems because the country code top level domain, or cctld, is not widely used).

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
May
05
2011
0

Thursday morning brief updates: video of the year, May Day appeal, conference, campaigns

Labour Video of the Year: 540 votes have been cast in the last 48 hours, averaging 270 votes cast per day. Last year, we got about 3,000 votes cast. So this year with another 26 days to go, we basically need 100 votes a day to reach the same number of people. You can watch the results in real time here.

May Day appeal: I’ve now written to all correspondents asking for their help to get their unions to donate. So far, the appeal has raised just under £2,000 (US$3,308). This is slightly more than we raised last year by this point.

Global Solidarity Conference: In another week from today, I’m off to Istanbul for a second meeting with the organizing committee. I’ll have a full report when I’m back.

Our campaigns: I continue to update this page – we’re now covered through July 2006, nearly five years. In that time, we ran 124 campaigns (an average of around 25 campaigns each year). Of those, 16 were very large campaigns (by our standards), with more than 5,000 messages sent out in English alone. Of those campaigns, there were one each from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK, Korea, Mexico and Zimbabwe. Two were Turkish campaigns. And nearly half of them – 7 campaigns – were focussed on workers in Iran.

May
04
2011
3

Easy list segmentation on MailChimp

What a boring title for a great thing!  I’ve just sent out a mailing to the 5,108 addresses on our English language list whose email addresses end with “.uk”.  That doesn’t cover everyone in the UK, but it’s a lot of people.  The mailing promotes two public meetings in London and Liverpool that the Egyptian trade union leader Kamal Abbas is speaking at later this month.  This means we can do the same for our Canadian, Australian and other lists in future.  This is a capacity we never really had before.

Written by admin in: Mailing list |
May
03
2011
0

Labour video of the year – cast your vote here

Click here to vote – the deadline is 31 May 2011.  Last year, we had about 3,000 votes cast – let’s see if we can beat that this year.

Written by admin in: Labour video of the year |
May
03
2011
0

LabourStart in Numbers

Here are the totals with the last month in brackets:

Mailing lists (with over 100 members)
English: 56.584 [56,950]
Norwegian: 2,759 [2,760]
French: 2,481 [2,462]
Spanish: 1,532 [1,614]
German: 839 [854]

Turkish: 689
Italian: 526
Russian: 493
Polish: 302
Portuguese: 252
Chinese: 243
Dutch: 234
Finnish: 178


Social networks
UnionBook 2.0 – members: 3,593 [3,503]
Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,369 [4,332]
Like LabourStart.org page 962 [120]
Twitter – followers: 3,469 [3,269]
Union group on Flickr: 637 [635]
LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 334 [318]


Website
Correspondents: 866 [865]
Unique visits to the site this month: 532,236 [509,194]

Page views this month: 1,245,761 [1,291,153]
Popular language home pages (last month in brackets):
* English 49,471 [45,959]
Our web host (1&1 Internet) no longer provides details beyond the 30 most popular pages, and none of the other language pages are in this category.

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