Inside LabourStart

The March 2009 issue of the magazine of the Education International features our photo of the year as well as a very nice article about LabourStart as its center pages.  You can download a copy here.

In May, Eric will be speaking to an EI communicators’ conference in Brussels about LabourStart and the net.

Last year’s was, I thought, a great success despite it being our first.

It was a lot of work however.  So I thought I’d ask if there’s interest in seeing it happen again before jumping in.

Comment here or contact me at derek.blackadder@sympatico.ca.

Thanks.

A not bad article on UB appearing in an Indian tech magazine site HERE.

I’ve spent much of the last couple of hours promoting our new Iraq campaign and I thought I’d share some of the ways we now do this. Where possible, I’ll tell you how many people directly learn about the campaign from these efforts.

1. Mailing to LabourStart list in English -52,207
2. Mailing to UnionBook members – 2,981
3. Mailing to LabourStart group on Facebook – 1,931
4. LabourStart followers on Twitter – 834
5. Mailing to UnionBook group on Facebook – 468
6. Creation of group on UnionBook; invites sent to all my friends; group automatically publicized on campaign page

We were asked by the TUC to help promote this event and for LabourStart to affiliate to BOND (“the UK membership body for non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working in international development”) and have done so.  I was able to extract 5,500 addresses from our general mailing list that had “.uk” in them somewhere, and sent them all a mailing yesterday.

From 1&1 Internet:

Please be advised that we will need to briefly shut down
the server on which your site is hosted while technicians
perform an internal hardware realignment.

The realignment will be performed overnight on 30 March 2009. Our
technicians will begin at 11:00 PM and finish by 1:00 AM the next
morning. Your website will be offline for up to one hour during
this time.

Your data will not be affected by the move. However, as a
precautionary measure, we recommend that you back up your
data before 30 March 2009.

You may find it useful to post a notice on your website telling
visitors or to inform web-based application users that your site or
service will be unavailable during this time.

If you have any questions or concerns before or after this process,
please contact our friendly support team.

I just had a request – as I frequently get – to publicize union news that doesn’t yet appear on the web.  In the past, we’ve always tried to get people to use our Labour News Network for this purpose.  But LNN, no matter how we did, has always been a bit tricky.  The latest version uses Jottit.com, which breaks one of our own rules (over-reliance on free tools that we can’t control).

Today I had an appeal to stop the deportation of a Saudi Arabian trade unionist from Britain.  Instead of posting it to the Jottit site, I used my own blog on UnionBook and made the blog entry public.  Then I linked to it from LabourStart. This way, it will be seen by every user visiting the public front page on UnionBook as well as those visiting LabourStart.

I’m thinking that if we slowly phase out the Jottit site, we can give people one more good reason to use UnionBook – as a publishing platform.

What do you think?

… has just gone out.  It’s brief and to the point and thanks all 64 of them for their donations in 2008.  My plan is to do a short mailing to the donors every month to keep them informed and to encourage them to continue their support.

This is a positive development.  Early in 2008, for the first few months actually, there were practically no individual donations.  But adding a prominent donation button to the final page of our campaigns has triggered some people to dig deep into their pockets.  Fewer than 10 donate regularly, but this is certainly a huge improvement over the past.

In the last two days, I’ve been inputting the names and email addresses of all our donors into a database using Highrise and plan to continue doing so in the future.  I think a monthly message to our regular donors is in order and will send out the first one next week – thanking them for what they did in the previous year.

We just hit the 400 members mark, thanks in large part to our first, but likely not last, Labour Photo of the Year Contest.

Just as importantly, we now have 3,701 photos in the group, the latest being a shot of Kamal Abu Eita announcing the formation of the Independent General Union of the Real Estate Tax Collectors in Egypt.  I’m mentioning this because this photo illustrates (pardon the play on words) the geographical diversity of the subjects of the photos in the group.  Unlike much of what’s on Flickr, our group isn’t quite so focussed on the global north.

If you haven’t already visited the group, do so at:

http://flickr.com/groups/union/