Nov
20
2018
0

November update: 2 campaigns launched, we revitalise LS in Spanish, German, Swedish, etc

Brazil: Following the election, we promoted the EI story about Brazil as a top global news story and across social media.

China: We promoted the story about a Chinese firm that forced workers to eat cockroaches and drink urine – as a top global news story, and on social media. Two officials at the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions signed up as LabourStart correspondents.

Germany: We renewed our Twitter account in German, and are posting to it every day. We now follow well over 400 other accounts and some of those have started following back, and as a result, this month we’ve picked up about 20 new followers. It’s a beginning.

India: We shared the ITUC story on erosion of labour laws in India as a top global news story and widely on social media. We also participated in a London meeting of various NGOs and campaigning organisations in the UK in support of workers in the tea plantations of Assam; the organisers of the event publicly thanked LabourStart for promoting their campaign targetting UK tea companies.

Indonesia: We shared the IUF story on Coca-Cola struggle as a top global news story and widely on social media.

Kazakhstan: We launched a new campaign at the request of many global and national unions to protest the repression of trade unionists here. In the first 5 days online, the campaign has over 3,600 supporters and appears in 11 languages.

Philippines: We shared a story about a trade unionist being killed in the Philippines on social media.

Spain: We are in discussion with one of the national trade union centres about a possible campaign, to be launched soon.

Sweden: We resume doing mailings to our Swedish list now that our campaigns are once again being translated into Swedish. We now have 7 volunteer translators for Swedish.

Thailand: We launched a new campaign at the request of IndustriALL to protest the behaviour of Mitsubishi Electric. After 12 days online, the campaign is in 13 languages and has over 5,450 supporters.

Turkey: We shared the ITUC story on the murder of a trade union leader as a top global news story and widely on social media. Our campaign in support of workers at Istanbul’s new airport, launched six weeks ago, is now in 23 languages, and has almost 8,700 supporters.

UK: We had a long meeting at Unite the Union’s headquarters to discuss future joint work. We created a meme in support of RMT strikers on the London Underground and post it on social media. It is very widely shared.

Finances: We thanked TUAC for their generous donation. Amazon has begun to pay us — finally — for books we have published using their CreateSpace platform and Kindle.

Internationalisation: We’re getting our campaigns framework translated into Kurdish and Nepalese and we had a campaign translated for the first time in a long time into Arabic. The Spanish home page now has all country names translated into Spanish, where we are now showing top global news stories, as we do in some other languages. Derek has also begun tweeting in Spanish.

Mailing lists: We added 93 new subscribers, who opted-in from campaigns.

News: We fixed the link that allows correspondents to change their default language and country, and tested it.

Nov
02
2018
0

LabourStart in Numbers – August-October 2018

Some highlights:

* There seems to be an increase in traffic to the site, with our internet host showing a rise to almost 400,000 visitors in this quarter — half of them coming from the USA and UK.

* As before, our mailing lists are shrinking in size, largely due to the effect of GDPR – which prevents us from automatically signing up new supporters for our campaigns. All of our top 10 lists except for Turkish have gotten smaller, and the only lists to grow were relatively small ones (Chinese, Esperanto and Hungarian).

* There has been some growth on Facebook — we’ve picked up over 300 new followers for our main page, and about another 100 have joined our group there (which is no longer branded as LabourStart).

* On Twitter we did much better, picking up 333 more followers for our main English global feed, 80 more for our Canadian English feed, and 187 more for our revived Australian feed.

* Our group on LinkedIn continues to grow, picking up 60 more members in this period.

* We are now back at 900 volunteer correspondents, as people continue to sign up to post news, but only a fraction of them remain active at any time.

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

Mailing lists

The top 10:

English: 80,850 – 81,559
French: 8,610 – 8,658
German: 6,103 – 6,131
Spanish: 5,356 – 5,372
Turkish: 4,260 – 4,189
Korean: 3,740 – 3,740
Italian: 3,719 – 3,733
Norwegian: 2,603 – 2,644
Russian: 2,450 – 2,484
Dutch: 1,669 – 1,669

The others:

Swedish: 1,179 – 1,180
Chinese: 1,043 – 1,040
Arabic: 957 – 957
Portuguese: 859 – 861
Polish: 798 – 798
Finnish: 562 – 595
Japanese: 446 – 447
Indonesian: 395 – 395
Hebrew: 262 – 264
Ukrainian: 254 – 273
Farsi: 232 – 232
Georgian: 217 – 217
Tagalog: 203 – 203
Esperanto: 177 – 174
Hungarian: 159 – 156
Danish: 86 – 91
Czech: 72 – 73
Thai: 64 – 64
Greek: 57 – 57
Romanian: 41 – 41
Hindi: 37 – 37
Vietnamese: 25 – 25
Bulgarian: 18 – 18
Slovakian: 15 – 15
Creole: 12 – 12
Sinhalese: 1 – 1

Facebook

Like LabourStart.org page (English): 12,698 – 12,395
Members of LabourStart group (Global Labour News and Information): 8,899 – 8,795
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 2,365 – 2,368
Like LabourStart UK page: 2,088 – 2,033
Like LabourStart page (French): 575 – 576
Like LabourStart page (German): 493 – 493
Friends of LabourStart Brasil: 450 – 428
LabourStart TV: 405 – 403
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 157 – 159
Members of LabourStart Vostok (Russian): 126 – 126

Twitter

English: 20,878 – 20,545
Canada English: 9,549 – 9,469
USA: 3,586 – 3,560
Australia: 2,863 – 2,676
Canada French: 1,939 – 1,957
Italian: 525 – 532
Swedish: 366 – 366
Indonesia: 353 – 353
Portuguese: 307 – 291
French: 236 – 231
German: 94 – 95
Spanish: 70 – 69
Russian: 31 – 28
Japanese: 19 – 19
Norwegian: 18 – 18
Turkish: 17 – 14
Dutch: 12 – 12
Arabic: 7 – 7

Linked In

LabourStart group: 2,088 – 2,028

Flickr

Union group on Flickr: 831 – 831

Website traffic to the main news website

Visitors 399,164 – 239,465

Top countries (by sessions):

USA 38% – 32%
UK 12% – 7%
India 6% – 6%
Germany 4% – 7%
Canada 4% – 7%

Correspondents: 900 – 883

Nov
02
2018
0

Reviving our campaigns and mailings in Italian, Polish, Arabic and other languages

Brazil: We gave extensive publicity to the IUF’s powerful editorial on the eve of the elections.

Canada: We did a mailing to our Canadian list promoting CLIFF, the labour film festival.

Italy: As we were having some difficulties getting our campaigns and mailings translated, we invited 819 Italian speakers on our English mailing list to volunter to help with translations — and have been inundated with many positive responses.

Poland: We did something similar to the Polish list, and now have translators and translations of our campaigns after a very long time.

Spain: We have been approached by Spanish unions about launching a campaign and hope to do this shortly.

Turkey: We shared Human Rights Watch’s story about the Istanbul airport struggle widely. At the moment, our campaign has 8,459 supporters and appears in 21 languages, with more coming. This campaign too should rise to above 10,000 supporters.

USA: We shared Unite Here’s Marriott campaign to social networks. We also shared widely a news story from the USA about journalists in new media who are organising and voting to strike.

Campaigns: We’ve improved the ability to share campaigns by email with friends in English. The French version is also being prepared now. We also now have translations of a basic text to use 7 days after a campaign launch, when writing a followup message to people who haven’t yet opened our mailing — this is now in English, French, Italian, Russian and Turkish, and our campaigns will now always receive a boost after a week in those languages. (Previously, we did this only in English.) Our attempts to find new volunteer translators for our campaigns in Arabic has not yet resulted in anything concrete, despite writing directly to more than 2,000 Arabic speakers on our English list.

Mailing lists: We added just 45 new subscribers to our lists, most of them for our Turkish list.

Articles: We shared Eric’s article from the current issue of International Union Rights magazine, on the subject of online campaigning as a top news story on LabourStart and on social networks.

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