Our current campaigns – in order of popularity
- Bahrain – 4,671 (after 79 days) +5
- Georgia – 3,412 (after 7 days) +60
- Iraq – 3,391 (after 37 days) +5
- Botswana – 3,343 (after 31 days) +3
- Colombia – 2,773 (after 17 days) +6
- Swaziland – 2,338 (after 77 days) +2
- Russia – 1,663 (after 28 days) +7
(Updated after 3 days – the numbers in blue indicate how many new supporters each campaign has signed up in the last three days.)
Some thoughts – and I’d love to hear yours …
- The Georgia campaign is doing exceptionally well after only a week. If we can keep up some momentum, this could become one of our big ones. This may be due to the big surge in our lists after the very successful online campaign in support of Canadian postal workers.
- The Russia campaign, on the other hand, is getting hardly any response at all. I wonder why. Could it be that people don’t want to get involved in what may be a complex case — one that requires us to trust a union’s account of what has happened and to distrust the authorities? Or is it just too obscure?
- Very disappointed in the Swaziland result, but my guess is that it’s the fact that there’s so little media attention paid (outside of southern Africa), so people don’t know where this is. Of course the same may be said of Georgia, but many Europeans will at least have a vague sense of where Georgia is.
- The Bahrain campaign is the next one we’ll shut down in another 11 days, and it’s unlikely (unfortunately) that it will be one of the special ones that clears the 5,000 mark. Too bad.
So, what do others think?
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Eric, despite being off work, this is an important issue. I suspect the answer is the standard one for researchers: we need more information (rather than views). Is there any way to test these issues with LS subscribers?
Obviously, responses to a campaign will depend on a huge range of factors, of which these are probably the key ones:
* how many people were informed (ie LS list plus re-directs)
* how much people are already involved (but from past experience, do we already know how much difference that makes?)
* how much people think their action will make a difference/is worth doing (can depend on past track record on an issue)
* how many people trust the information they receive (I don’t know how much difference this makes: LS is likely to be emailing people who trust it, but when faced with cliktivism appeals generally, I tend only to take actions I know to have been sanctioned by people with expertise and locus)
Regarding Georgia. I believe the secret of the success is that the mailing mentioned exactly the way we expect to make an impact – i.e. Georgian government depends on European and American partners and is therefore valnurable to EU/US/international public opinion. I bet if you would tell people about the general preferences and ILO background of the story not many would sign as they would feel frustrated.
Regarding Russia. God knows how many people really participated as we asked them to write Medvedev using kremlin.ru, not LS. Not all might be bothered to sent two messages. On the other hand, I still believe this is a good result for such an ambigous looking case.
One constant I have heard when asking the question here (that being ‘why do you participate in some campaigns and not others?’) is that if little is know of the place or situation prior to the approach by LS, then the probability of participation drops. I’ve never been able to get anyone to say that they don’t trust LS, that they don’t and won’t take our word on the legitimacy of a struggle somewhere out there, but there’s clearly a direct relationship between general or prior knowledge of a country and/or union and/or employer and/or issue and the inclination to participate in a campaign.
To put it another way, someone who knows nothing of Swaziland might have little inclination to participate in that campaign, but it rises if the union is known to them, rises again if the employer or circumstance is a familar one.
I’ve been thinking about the above for a while and find it vaguely depressing. I would prefer to see a more reflexive solidarity response. Mebbe next year. 🙂
In any case and like it or not, we cannot assume that our ‘brand’ is as yet so trusted that we can be assured of participation simply because a campaign is a LabourStart campaign. ITUC or GUF endoresement doesn’t (here at least) help a great deal because for most Canadian trade unionists, even at a fairly senior level, those bodies are not or little-known.
Another, though perhaps closely-related factor is the complexity of the issue or circumstance. Something simple and familar like an end to asbestos use seems easier to grasp and so therefore more popular.
And of course there’s the ‘snap, crackle, pop’ component: some things for some reasons just seem to grab people’s imaginations. If we knew what those are or would be in each case we’d be assured of near-100% participation rates instead of hoping for 20%.
Finally, I regularly get feedback indicating a kind of paranoia of the left. The last time I had a chance with a group of private sector union members to explore this was in a workshop re. online campaigning where I used a comparison (one I like a lot) between a campaign we ran for an Iranian facing the death penalty for his union activity, and a young Irish woman fired for wearing a union badge at work. Started on the same day, one was a rip-roaring success, the other not. Guess which was which?
In discussing the varying levels of participation in those campaigns there was a clear if incoherent reluctance to participate in the Iran campaign. I heard statements like “If I had the CIA would probably have gotten my personal information and recorded my participation”. In the workshop setting it wasn’t possible to explore this further.
Finally, I suspect part of the problem, at least for the people in the room, all of whom knew LS well and who participate regualry in our camapigns, is that they are subject to various non-LS influences (hard to believe, no? 🙂 ) and have therefore a tendency to shy away from anything ‘iran’.
PS The Canadian campaign Eric mentions caught fire here for a number of reasons, not least of which were the iconic reputation of the union involved and a pre-exisitng consensus on the broad left that our federal government was using CUPW to warm-up for a sustained attack on (among other things) unions.
One obvious solution is to target our recruiting to the mailing lists. So, for example, if we had a greater presence in Southern Africa, we’d see bigger numbers in the Swazi campaign.
It is essential to view the modest engagement of people —prior to the Arab Spring– (workers, trade union unionists and peace activists) from the Middle East and Iraq in particular in labourstart campaigns as a sign of huge positive developments and not a sign of people do not care or people don’t know – although the trust factor is key here especially in Iraq-.
I am not trying to avoid facing the question head on—increasing and strengthening engagement in LS campaigns-. But I wanted to mention that labourstart has contributed enormously to workers and human rights in the Middle East and Iraq in particular. And in the case of Iraq I understand that most of the pressure has come from outside the country rather than from within. But the outcome of all LS campaign in Iraq were/are nevertheless success! Example of this is the impact of current LS campaign to stop Iraqi authorities of removing the head of the OIL and Gas Workers Union in Kirkuk and locating him in a remote place. The threat of the transfer is still though hanging over his head. But for now the campaign, in my view, with support of the global trade union movement managed to persuade the Iraqi authorities to reverse their attacks on unions. Thanks to LS he is till working in Kirkuk.
I agree flow of Information is an essential factor in persuading national and international colleagues to sign and support any LS campaigns. And I for one put my hands up and say that flow of TU information from Iraq is slow and I and my federation need to do more.
But please bear in mind that the Middle East, or as it is called -the Arab streets- is totally dominated by the conspiracy theory model. I am not dismissing genuine inquires of course not- but i am talking here about sinister model of conspiracy theory that reigned so heavily and for so long on the minds of so many good people persuading them to believe of hidden enemy agendas.
This model of thought (conspiracy) is now under retreat, thanks to the Arab Spring. But this model unfortunately is not defeated yet. LS needs to keep the efforts of its global solidarity going for now and debate the valid issue raised by LS at a later date.
The people of Middle East and in Iraq in particular are now fighting a war for democracy and human rights and peace.
For I believe that LS contribution to peace, jobs and democracy and freedom of speech and association in Iraq and the Middle East in general will soon bear fruits. But we must stay our ground.
Abdullah
Can’t help but to agree with most of the above.
Derek has a very good point with the unionist paranoia. I find this in other domains such as helping to communicate at election time. Some seem embarrassed at their own achievements and prefer not to mention them in case they are badly judged by voters.
However, I have four other points to raise:
1) The first concerns the campaign text. I’ve translated quite a few of these now and until present, the easiest campaigns to translate were those that were well written in English. I’m pretty certain those campaigns got the best results… Until the Canadian campaign which sends my theory haywire. But I still wonder if an English unionist from England read this text as easily as a North American and understood immediately what a “Back to work law” was and clicked!. In French it was even worse. “Une loi de retour au travail” needs quite a lot of figuring out for a unionist in France. I’m not saying my translations are better… But the stats do say that whilst we had an amazing participation from French speaking Canadians (despite my quack), the stats on French-frenchies are down on this one. Otherwise said, we delivered a message “saying what most wanted to hear “.
2) The second concerns the newsletter. Although there have been considerable improvements over the last months (notably MailChimp of which I was quite critical at first), there are several phrases that come back over and over… I wonder how many can be eliminated by anti-spam systems. MailChimp seems to get us through to most (all) providers even Hotmail and Gmail which were problems before. But we don’t know how many of our mails are automatically eliminated by systems linked to individual programs. My Thunderbird, for example, educates itself. If I click once or twice (even accidentally) on the spam button, I have to look in the spam folder for subsequent emails. I don’t have a solution for this except to vary texts and addresses.
3) Concerning Russia and Georgia, the iron curtain may have physically been demolished, but not intellectually – Russia (the word) being more an “adversary” than Georgia during all those long years (unionists being mainly in the elder categories) this could explain that. Another example would be Kazakhstan. Top story on LabourStart : Sting cancels a concert. Not a word on media in France.
4) Our site, with its “bootlace and chewing gum” budget, despite being based on a certain economic model, is dating in campaigning techniques.
Technically speaking; for both newsletter and campaigning techniques, we could take lessons from Avaaz. I sign up to certain campaigns just to see my name shown on the next screen. But do I really know them any better than LabourStart? We need to convince people of our objectives, but do they want to be believers or just sign-uppers?.
Once again, the workers movement is being doubled by technology and money, and if I am very far-reached, why not by organizations that master online technologies to a point that labour organizations cannot compete? Who choses between the thousands of sign-uppers and the millions? Money?
The world is governed by confidence. If the majority takes out it’s confidence, what will happen?
It may also be time for us to be more considered about what we do to push people towards the campaigns. Start planning Twitter campaigns and such,. And are we up to starting to assign activities to correspondents, senior and otherwise?
First of all I want to thank everyone for your comments – very useful ones.
Some quick responses, in no particular order:
1 Owen is right that the size of the campaign depends in part on how many people were informed about it – and not only through LabourStart’s lists. That’s why we were hoping that a campaign launched, for example, at the request of the United Steelworkers (Colombia – Vale) would benefit from the union’s own vast membership and that of its close allies (e.g., Unite in the UK). But this does not always work out as we hope, and in some cases, unions do what I would consider to be the bare minimum of publicity (like a link on their website) rather than aggressively promoting the campaign. We cannot force unions to do more, but we encourage them to do so.
2. It is indeed important the people trust the campaigns, and we should find a way to highlight who is actually proposing it. To use the above example, it might have helped – especially with union members in the USA and Canada – to have had a little box with the logo of the USW and an explanation of the fact this is their campaign. I will explore ways to do this, to integrate that extra added bit of trustworthiness into our campaign page.
3. Masha makes a good point about the Russia campaign — we did ask people to write directly to Medvedev, so this has certainly slowed down participation in our online effort. Still, I wonder if people automatically accept it when we tell them a trade unionist jailed on criminal charges is actually innocent — that does require a certain level of trust. (See previous point.)
4. Derek makes a number of good points, not least the fact that GUF or ITUC endorsement may not carry as much weight as we’d hoped in some countries. One would think that the endorsement of a major national union (again, the USW springs to mind) would help, as people trust unions they know or belong to. It might also be interesting to do a kind of warm up before campaigns, if we can (we usually don’t have the time) — in other words, send out more than one mass mailing about Swaziland, perhaps suggest some other activity, and then followup with a campaign hoping that we’ve raised consciousness. But this requires some lead time, and we’re often approached by GUFs and others with emergency situations where we don’t have the time to any preparation among our readers.
5. I take on board Derek’s point that having a strong mailing list in, say, Southern Africa, would have helped with the Swazi campaign. But it’s a catch-22 situation: we build a mailing list by taking on issues that concern trade unionists in Southern Africa, but so long as our list there remains small, the campaign remains small and ineffective, and the list doesn’t grow. We have tried non-campaign techniques in the past, such as the labour website, photo and video of the year, but these have not produced spectacular results in recent years.
6. I appreciate Abullah’s comments, and hope that no one misinterpreted my remarks as some kind of criticism of our comrades in the Arab countries. Far from it. I wasn’t expecting a significant response rate from, say, Iraq — especially as we’ve only just recently begun campaigning in Arabic and our mailing list is still very, very small. It’s great to hear that our campaigns are having an impact on the ground — but it’s also important we be able to tell our 75,000+ readers when we do have a success, to give them details, to make them feel that there’s a reason to send off messages in future. The flow of information from Iraq, Georgia, Colombia, Swaziland, Bahrain etc is not good, and we have to improve this.
7. Andy is right that we have a problem with the campaign texts. As this work is done behind the scenes, most of you will not be aware that we basically take what we’re given and do minimal editing. So the texts sometimes read poorly as a result. We should probably be less conservative, and more assertive, in dealing with those who propose campaigns to us.
8. As for learning the lessons of Avaaz and other very well funded operations, we have done so in the past. At one point a while back, I went through the whole Avaaz campaign process (as seen by a user) and noted everything they did which we didn’t yet do, and then incorporated all the changes. At that point, we were doing everything Avaaz was — on a fraction of their budget. If there are other, new features that Avaaz or other campaigning groups do which we should adopt, please make specific recommendations and I’ll see what we can do. As I noted above, I think one thing we will do is highlight (with a box, logo and text) who is actually proposing a campaign to help build trust.
Again, my thanks to all you — a great discussion. We’re doing well, and as Abdullah reminds us, we’re having an impact on the real world. The struggle continues.
Yes inded, great discussion.
One response to Eric’s summary…on (5): rather than rely on electronic osmosis to build our lists for us in regions where we have minimal penetration, can we not try to target an area and plan out a campaign to recruit first some key ‘insiders’ in that region and then work with them to build our penetration in that area?
On reliability and instituational support.
Let’s compare Georgia and Russia:
LS Georgia campaign is part of a wider effort by ITUC and several global unions to change situation in the country. It is not going on alone – there are rallies locally, international speaches, circulars, urgent action calls, which are developed institutionally by number of unions.
LS Russia campaign is the initiative of a local union and a small group of activists (reliable but very small). It evolves out of a very controversial background, where Urusov’s union was bought by the governement and refused to support his case. It took us long time to get an agreement of various democratic unions that the case should be supported. There is still no formal endorsement of ITUC, any of the GUFs. The result is self telling. But it is more than satisfactory. Tactically this first campaign aims to bring attention and gain support of big unions and to prepare for the next phase. We don’t aim at big numbers and we feel gratefull to all who trust us in this campaign and support it. The numbers are important, but in this case we rather want to pass the information and message around.
One last thing (I think): I had a bit of a commitment, more than usual, to the CUPW campaign and spent a lot more time that I have with any of the current campaigns doing things like tweeting it several times a day, posting something about it and a link at least twice a day on Facebook, that kind of thing.
Do we need perhaps to make that kinbd oif commitment to every campaign and to ‘assign’ a senior correspondent to do all this for every campaign that comes our way?
Derek’s making a very good point. We need more LabourStart senior correspondants spearheading campaigns to bring home loud and clear that this is a BIG organization and also, to foil spam filters.
We also need to adapt UnionBook so that it will become a support (and understanding) for campaigns.
A reason for us all to take that freebie course from the British Columbia Federation of Labour and to starting building our networks of ‘freiends’ and ‘followers’. 🙂
Just a little demonstration of why this is an important discussion for us: since the Canadian post office campaign Canada has consistently had the single largest national numbers for the campaigns that have followed. More than the USA (10 times the population) and the UK (about twice the population). The snowball effect in action.
One last last last note.
Every campaign since the CUPW campaign has seen the Canadian share of total participation significantly improved as compared with pre-CUPW campaigns. To the point where Canadians are the largest single national group. Evidence that campaigning with a local appeal is the best, perhaps the only, way to build a presence?