Dec
28
2017
0

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

First of all, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of you.

This report is the first in 19 days. This is due to my being on vacation for most of that time.

December has not been an especially quiet period for LabourStart.

Our Campaigns:

The Algeria campaign, supported by the IUF, IndustriALL, PSI and the ITUC was launched on 18 December in the run-up to the Christmas holiday, so we expected a lower take-up than usual. Nevertheless, it has already gotten 5,360 supporters, appears in 5 languages, and there are a number of translations waiting to be posted (which we hope to get online later today).

In addition we are in the process of launching a Fiji campaign at the request of the ITF, but are waiting for good target email addresses before launching a full publicity effort.

At the request of the Clean Clothes Campaign, we re-opened the Chung Fai campaign.

Earlier in the month, we discovered problems in our campaigns with long messages which were causing bounces, so we have needed to break these up into shorter paragraphs.

Other organisations’ campaigns:

We helped Amnesty International promote their campaign in support of jailed Iranian trade unionist Esmail Abdi, who has been the focus of more than one LabourStart campaign. That campaign had just 1,648 supporters when we started our publicity, and we helped to double that within one day.

New translators:

We have a new translator for our Dutch campaigns, and will be getting help on Polish and Arabic in the new year.

Mailing lists:

We’ve experienced significant growth this month, adding 632 new addresses to our lists.

Written by admin in: Campaigns,Mailing list |
Dec
11
2017
0

LabourStart in Numbers – December 2017

This is the first report in six months – sorry for the delay. The next report will come out in three months.

Some highlights:

* Our mailing are growing smaller; this happens when we use them a lot, and MailChimp deletes subscribers whose email addresses are no longer valid. The only way to get around this is to recruit new people to our lists, which we are doing, but not fast enough. The only list to show significant growth was Ukrainian, which nearly doubled in size.

* We’ve had slow growth on Facebook, except for our Turkish and UK pages, which have grown spectacularly, as well as our LabourStart TV Facebook page.

* On Twitter, we’ve seen good growth for main English global feed, and massive growth thanks to the efforts of Derek and Roy, to the USA feed, which has nearly tripled in size.

* Traffic to the websites is growing. We had about 56,000 unique visitors to the news site, and the same to the campaigns site, in the last six months. The main sources of traffic continue to be the USA, Canada, and the UK.

In the list below, the first number is the current total, the second one is our previous total.

Mailing lists

English: 84,753 – 86,489
French: 8,993 – 9,051
German: 6,279 – 6,274
Spanish: 5,509 – 5,525
Turkish: 4,217 – 4,262
Italian: 3,871 – 3,947
Korean: 3,773 – 3,995
Norwegian: 2,709 – 2,755
Russian: 2,580 – 2,579
Dutch: 1,667 – 1,696
Swedish: 1,243 – 1,243
Chinese: 1,074 – 1,086
Portuguese: 877 – 869
Polish: 798 – 798
Finnish: 643 – 643
Arabic: 495 – 496
Japanese: 494 – 493
Indonesian: 392 – 335
Hebrew: 276 – 279
Ukrainian: 268 – 142
Farsi: 232 – 232
Tagalog: 225 – 227
Esperanto: 169 – 172
Hungarian: 158 – 164
Danish: 97 – 100
Czech: 79 – 82
Thai: 67 – 67
Greek: 58 – 58
Romanian: 41 – 41
Hindi: 37 – 37
Vietnamese: 25 – 25
Slovakian: 20 – 20
Bulgarian: 18 – 18
Creole: 12 – 12
Sinhalese: 1 – 1

Facebook:

Like LabourStart.org page (English): 12,379 – 12,208
Members of LabourStart group (Global Labour News and Information): 8,874 – 8,797
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 2,506 – 230
Like LabourStart UK page: 2,037 – 516
Like LabourStart page (French): 578 – 564
Like LabourStart page (German): 496 – 491
LabourStart TV – 401
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 163 – 158
Members of LabourStart Vostok (Russian): 117 – 108
Friends of LabourStart Brasil: [could not update this time]

Twitter

English: 18,488 – 17,678
Canada English: 7,745 – 6,953
Australia: 2,653
USA: 1,898 – 677
Canada French: 1,872 – 1,780
Italian: 538 – 524
Swedish: 370 – 372
Indonesia: 360 – 367
Portuguese: 278 – 253
French: 230 – 230
German: 92 – 94
Spanish: 70 – 69
Japanese: 21 – 21
Russian: 19 – 19
Norwegian: 19
Turkish: 16
Dutch: 12
Arabic: 8

Website traffic (1 June – 30 November 2017)

LabourStart.org (news)

Unique users 55,884 – 35,345

Top countries (by sessions):

USA 21% – 22%
Canada 16% – 15%
UK 12% – 11%
Australia 5% – 5%
India 5% – 8%

Most popular pages – page views:

Home page – English 48,545 – 26,088
USA – English 20,156 – 7,655
Canada – English 8,527 – 5,146
India 5,175 – 4,710
UK – 3,465

LabourStartCampaigns.net (campaigns)

Unique users 56,231 – 33,249

Top countries (by sessions):

UK 14% – 14%
Canada 12% – 9%
USA 12% – 14%
Indonesia 7%
Germany 6% – 7%

Most popular pages – page views:

The number in brackets is the total number of those who have signed up to support the campaign.

Indonesia: 4,220 striking miners fired – 23,380 [14,714]
Colombia: Drop sanctions against trade union leader – 11,723 [7,703]
Cambodia: Support abandoned workers in their struggle for lost wages and benefits 8,214 [8,465]
Indonesia: Every child must go to school – ICTSI must stop targeting union members – 7,012 [7,291]
Libya: End campaign of intimidation against Nermin Al-Sharif – 6,795 [6,857]

Linked In

LabourStart group: 2,042 – 2,051

Flickr

Union group on Flickr: 829 – 827

Website

Correspondents: 873 – 864

Dec
09
2017
0

Big victory in Libya campaign

As I will be travelling from 13-24 December, this will probably be the last update to Inside LabourStart before Christmas. I’d like to wish all of you a merry Christmas and happy Chanukkah.

The big news this week is that our campaign helped force the Libyan government to return Nermin’s passport and to apologise to her. This is a big win for us and the ITF, and the ITF has acknowledged this in their statement. We have begun informing all of our mailing lists about this victory. (Unlike other organisations, we don’t use every victory — or even every mailing — as an excuse to fundraise. Sometimes, you just want to share good news, full stop.)

While we didn’t launch any new LabourStart campaigns this week, we did do a mailing to promote the IUF’s current Iran campaign, as well as promoting that on social media. As we often get complaints (a handful each time) when we do this — why am I getting this mailing twice? why am I being asked to support a campaign that I already signed up to? — I included a sentence this time explaining that this is an IUF campaign, not a LabourStart one, and we cannot know who has supported it, and so on. As a result, we got only one complaint letter this time.

I have also begun including in our mailings, again, links to Tweet and post these messages to Facebook, as well as a special link to forward messages. If people just use their email clients to forward messages, as many do, they are forwarding messages that include a unique unsubscribe link, which anyone receiving the message can click on, and sometimes do. When that happens, the original recipient will usually receive a message from MailChimp telling them that they’ve been unsubscribed — and they sometimes write to ask us why this happened.

We — and the IUF — were having issues with some of our campaign messages being bounced; we have now learned why (our default messages were sometimes too long) and this has now been fixed, and we are monitoring this more closely now.

Finally, as I wrote last week, we’ve now formally nominated our candidates to receive the Svensson prize next year.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Dec
04
2017
1

Libya campaign grows – but not fast enough

Nermin campaign: This is now up to 6,736 supporters and is in 15 languages. This is a gain of nearly 2,000 in the last week, in part due to a second mass mailing to the nearly 73,000 people who did not open the first message we sent. We can do this in languages other than English if translators are willing to help. Support for the campaign is still lower than we would have hoped, and the previous three campaigns all have more supporters than this one.

It seems that there has been a problem with long messages in our campaigns, which recently may have been causing some bounces. This is now fixed, we think.

Our mailing lists continue to grow; this week we added 164 new subscribers, most of them to the English list, but a significant number to the German as well.

Every day we share a number of stories on social media, and highlight one major one which gets publicised across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This week, those highlighted stories included a blog on gender-based violence within trade unions, a ban on strikes in Colombia, the announcement by South Africa’s new national trade union centre SAFTU that it was on course to have 1,000,000 members by the end of the year, Indian tea workers who demonstrated at the same time as there was a big UN conference in Geneva about business and human rights, and Friedrich Engels’ birthday.

We’re almost ready with a leaflet for the new year, just waiting on some photos.

Svensson prize: we’ve had a discussion about who LabourStart might recommend for next year’s prize, and this week we’ll inform the organisers.

Our next book is the second volume of Dan Gallin’s writings. We made progress this week, but are a bit stuck with some low-quality PDFs which need to be converted to text. Anyone who has ideas about how to do this, or is willing to help, please make contact. Meanwhile, one full chapter has now been formatted correctly.

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