Inside LabourStart

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.