Inside LabourStart

With Christmas nearly upon us, work is beginning to slow down – not taking on any new, major projects (and, I hope, no new campaigns) before the new year.

Successful campaigns book: This is now complete, with an introduction by the IUF’s Ron Oswald.  It runs more than 60 pages and we should be able to submit it to Amazon tomorrow (Wednesday) and should have books in hand by the end of the year.  The working title is Campaigning online – and winning: How LabourStart’s ActNOW campaigns are making unions stronger.

Labour newswires: We’ve now set up and tested labour newswires in JavaScript and RSS for the four nations of the UK – England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.  (This was Edd’s first ‘techie’ job, editing and uploading the files.)  We’ll be promoting these to UK union websites, hoping to grow our base of UK sites using our newswires from 20 to 40.  In the process of doing this, we discovered we had no recent stories from Wales, so we’ve added some and are following up with our Welsh correspondents to make them active.

Today in Labour History: Did more work setting this up; a version now appears on the front page of the website, but this is a very rough draft.   (The PHP version will look much nicer.) We have our first additional volunteer to help (from New Zealand), so we’re now a team of 3, but I hope we’ll begin recruiting others soon.

Book of the month: This month we promoted a subscription to International Union Rights; we earn £8 per sub sold, and as of yesterday morning we’d sold 33, so we’ve made £264,  This is more than we made in the previous four months selling books with UCS.  It is less than I’d hoped (I was hoping for at least 50 sales, maybe 100), but this is still much better than we normally do in a month.

Internationalization of campaigns: Edd reviewed how our campaigns appear in different languages and we found a number of places where English was still appearing.  I wrote to all our translators and we’ve made quite a few fixes in the Spanish, French, Norwegian, Indonesia, Vietnamese, and Chinese versions of campaigns.

New correspondents: We’ve added several new ones, including two more from Taiwan, our first active correspondent in the Bulgarian language for some time, and more.

Facebook: I wrote to key correspondents about doing additional versions beyond our English, French and Turkish pages.  Some interest has been shown in creating Indonesian and Chinese pages.

New site design: I spent several hours crafting a new front page for English (which could be the template for other languages).  It’s three columns wide, contains many more images, has a larger font, and features a much simpler navigation.  (That’s a screen shot of where we stand now with this, above.)  I hope to have something to show you all in 2013, but the adventurous among you can ask me for the URL so you can see the work-in-progress for yourself.

Closed campaigns: We’ll be closing the Guatemala campaign after three months today.

Campaigns: We launched three campaigns during this 25-day period – “Cameroon: Musicians union march attacked by police“, “Nissan USA’s union busting is a global shame“, and “Netherlands: Union organizers, MP arrested; denied access to care-home workers“. We closed down several – including the Pakistan fire campaign (one of our very largest) and the Turkey DHL campaign. We’ve also started work on the ActNOW DIY project, but this is turning out to be quite complex and will take some time.

Campaign successes book: We’re nearly ready with this — a short book which we’ll distribute at cost which goes over our many victories in the last ten years.  The working title is Campaigning online – and winning: How LabourStart’s ActNOW campaigns are making unions stronger.

Labour Book of the Month: We’ve been exploring some interesting options including working with UK booksellers (three have come forward), reviving our account with Powells.com, selling magazine subscriptions (we’ve been talking with Hazards and International Union Rights), selling our TUC book on the Iraqi labour movement (we have 100 in stock) and selling our campaign successes book (see above).  At present, we earn very, very little from our bookselling partnership with UCS.

Today in Labour History: This is nearly complete – we can now have multiple users and we’ve already got quite a few dates in the database, which can now be sorted by country and language, just like LabourStart’s news database.

Fundraising: We’ve now sent out our brochure and individual letters to the heads of every union in Australia.

Labour Newswires: Edd has gone through the whole directory deleting all the dead links and we’re down to 286 sites that use the newswire — 40% of where we were before, when we had over 700. It’s time to rebuild the list by getting all the newswires working, adding new ones, and promoting them aggressively.

Conferences: Work has begun — initially just some exploratory emails — on a Berlin conference in May 2014. Oh yes, and we held a Global Solidarity Conference in Sydney.

This is almost certainly going to be the last weekly summary before December — on Thursday I’m off to Sydney for the third annual LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference and will not be back before 2 December.  Some highlights from the last week:

Conference – going well, lots of last minute work dealing with people coming, cancelling, the programme, lunches, etc.  The Facebook Event page had to be cleaned up a bit as we were getting spammed.  Today – with only a week to go – we have 193 people registered to attend, of those 145 from Australia and 5 from New Zealand.

Campaigns – we got permission to close down the Pakistan campaign.  On Friday we got our first campaign request ever from the International Federation of Musicians — we’ll launch this later today.  The Guatemala campaign is two months old; I asked the sponsor what they wanted to do.  Meanwhile, the Bahrain campaign is well over 10,000 names making it one of the largest we’ve ever done.

Book of the month – we did our second one last Monday, and by Wednesday I was growing concerned that 98% of those who were clicking through to learn more about the book were not ordering it.  I then did a survey on Survey Monkey to find out why.  We got a very large number of responses (482 and counting) and I’ll close the survey tomorrow and will publish a summary here.  We’ve learned a lot, I think, from this experience.

Publicity – on Monday I was interviewed by a journalist from a Swiss-German left-wing magazine called Woz.  They did a similar interview more than a decade ago – this was the follow-up.  He strongly suggested that we work closely with LaborNet Germany – I followed up by sending a message to all three leading figures, but have not yet gotten a response.

Regional RSS feeds – I was able to fix the Caribbean region, meaning that now I should be able to get all of them working again.  But this may not happen before December, unfortunately.

Course – on Wednesday, I did a 45 minute session for the European Trade Union Institute in Brussels — they had a dozen or so trade union officials from across the continent and using Skype video, I introduced them to online campaigning.

Fundraising – we’ve now mailed our brochure and a cover letter to every president of every union in the USA.

Conference: Programme and flyer are now ready and have been widely publicized.  The number of registrants is now around 140, 100 of them from Australia.  We need to double that.  Conference opens in less than 3 weeks …

Campaigns: We’re about to launch a new campaign re Mexico; details later today.  I tightened up security on the page showing who supports our campaigns – you now need a password to view it.  I also did the fortnightly mailing to all our campaign partners.  We’re also working on some interesting changes that could allow unions to create their own campaigns on LabourStart, as they can do now on sites like change.org.  The Bahrain campaign is at 7,300 supporters, making it larger than the one we did earlier in the year, and our second-largest current campaign.

Newswires: I tried to fix the Caribbean RSS newswire and discovered that all our regional RSS newswires aren’t working.  Still trying to fix this, hoping to get it all sorted this week.  I discovered that the ActNOW RSS feed has not been updated since we moved servers and aim to fix that this week as well.  Our Labour Newswire Global Network – the directory of sites that use the newswire – is being cleaned up for the first time in years.

Education & Training: I did preparations for a course I’m helping to deliver for the European Trade Union Institute later this month — wrote up some notes and located articles to share with participants on the subject of online campaigning.

App: I’ve made a breakthrough of sorts, and have done a lot of work on apps for LabourStart and the IUF in the last week.  Expect to see something very soon.

Today in labour history: This is a new feature for our website — and possibly for a print calendar next year.  Our intern, Edd, is working on it.

Fundraising: We’ve prepared a letter and brochure to be sent to regional offices of most of the major British unions.

Labour Book of the Month: We’ve selected the November featured book, and will publicize it next week.  We’ve made contact with some British bookshops about doing a UK version of this as well.

To be fair, I was away for more than a week …

Intern: We had 12 applicants. Derek Blackadder (Canada) and John Wood (UK) helped me prepare a shortlist of 4, who will be interviewed on Monday, 22 October. Roger Darlington has volunteered to assist with the interviews.

Conference: We’re working hard to build this — it’s only 6 weeks away. We did a mailing on 24.9 to our lists in Australia and New Zealand. I’ve provided the organizers with a list of who to invite from the region, and have been in touch with several others from outside the region whose flights we are subsidizing.

New campaigns: We launched a campaign in support of workers in Guatemala; we ran a short and sharp campaign in support of jailed Turkish trade unionists; we launched a campaign in support of labour NGOs in China facing repression.

Closed campaigns: I closed down five campaigns – China (Li Wang Yang), UK (RMT Olympics), Turkey (Togo), Morocco and Kazakhstan.

Labour book of the month: I’ve revived this, and in the first 4 days, we sold over $600 worth of books.

Facebook: I tested the promotion of one of the posts on our page. This was the post – “Over 300 dead textile workers in Pakistan – demand justice! Support the online campaign!” It was seen by 63,151 people, 713 of them liked it, 23 commented on it, and 150 shared it. A typical post on Facebook is seen by a tiny fraction of that — usually around 5,000 people. The cost was $100.

Sponsorship of LabourStart UK: UIA, which provides insurance cover for union members here, now has a banner on our UK website, for which they are paying us.

Ukrainian: We have a new newswire in Ukrainian, following a request. I’ve also provided them with a list of country names for translation.

Urdu: We had an offer to translate our Pakistan campaign, but there’s been no translation yet.

Swedish & Danish: We’ve done a mailing to our small lists in these two languages to try to recruit new correspondents and translators.

South Africa: I’ve written both to all our existing correspondents and to hundreds of our readers there in an effort to get more active correspondents.

Brochure distribution: I’ve recruited three volunteers to help me distribute LabourStart brochures at Saturday’s giant demonstration and march organized by the Trades Union Congress in London.

This is a bit delayed because I was on holiday from 13-20 July but now back at work and making progress on several issues.  Here are some highlights:

Conference: Our organizing committee continues to function; I have a conference call scheduled with them for next week.

Correspondents: The internal messaging system is now fixed; there had been a problem before that spam could be sent, though not via email, to all correspondents.

Campaigns:

• Closed: The Unite bus campaign in the UK was closed down following a victory. Another Unite campaign, in support of MMP workers, was closed down after three months.
• I added a key to the flags and languages here.
• We asked for and received the support of IndustriALL in the Kazakhstan campaign.
• New campaigns launched in support of sacked trade unionists in Peru and Turkey, and RMT cleaners in London.
• I fixed a bug in our special news pages for the UK, USA, Canada and Australia – we were not showing lists of the most current campaigns there, but we are now.
• Closed and archived campaigns – When trying to view certain closed campaigns, you couldn’t actually call them up – but I’ve now fixed this and you can see any campaign. I fixed the display of supporters for a campaign which has been closed. There’s now an accessible archive of closed campaigns.

Office: I’ve begun an intensive search for a London office.

Mailing list: We now have more than 100,000 addresses.

Book: I was approached by UCS, our book-selling partner in the USA, about doing a primer for trade unionists on use of the net.  I’ve agreed to do so.  Details to follow.

Internationalization:

• A problem was discovered with part of the display of the Turkish website; this is now nearly fixed.
• Work began on a Ukrainian edition – also nearly complete.

Newswires: Two more unions added the labour newswire to their sites.

Fundraising:

• The IUF has agreed to make a substantial donation to LabourStart.
• In addition, we’ve received several large donations from Canadian unions.
• We had 2,000 copies of our new fundraising brochure printed and I have begun mailing them out one by one to selected unions; the first target audience is Irish unions.

It’s been a busy day …

• All recent supporters of our campaigns have now been added to our mailing lists on MailChimp – we’re seeing signficant growth for the German list, which indicates that our campaigns are now being promoted there by at least one union.
• The mass mailing regarding our Egypt campaign has gone out for translation and we’ve gotten translations back already in at least two languages.
• I’ve done further work on our Wikipedia entry, including trying to create an entry for UnionBook but am encountering some resistance there.
• I’ve written to comrades in Georgia about getting a Georgian language version of our campaigns up – particularly the current Georgian one.  Am awaiting their reply.
• Mac Urata at the ITF has agreed to help us get a Japanese version of the campaigns up and running.
• On UnionBook, I’ve managed to sort comments in Groups in reverse date order – something which people have asked for.
• I’ve begun the process of creating a secure directory (URLs would begin with https://) on our site – this is needed if we use Facebook for some pages, which has been done for our French version.
• It’s been suggested that we could get an article about LabourStart published in a left-wing Esperanto magazine; I’ve asked one of our correspondents who speaks the language to take care of this.
• Using a service called Conduit Mobile I’ve been doing further work on a small, simple UnionBook app for mobile devices.
• I did extensive work on our newswires today, including getting the French RSS feed to work properly, reviewing the ActNOW RSS feed in French and Norwegian (now fixed), the Health and Safety wire in French (seems OK), and tweaking our new French language newswire for North Africa.  In addition I completed work on migrating all the regional newswires over to our new database – finally.

• We’ve resumed the book of the month. The next mass mailing will feature it. Today, social media was used to publicize. This month, it’s Joe Hill.
• ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow has agreed to open our conference with a video message. She can’t be there, but this is the next best thing. We hope to get the message in time to allow us to subtitle it in Turkish (and Arabic?)
• Our first app for a smartphone is nearly ready (within 24 hours). If you have a Nokia smartphone, let me know. We have submitted something to their app store. (The iOS and Adroid versions are in the works.)
• We’ve sent a long message to PSI about their Korea campaign with suggestions about how to revive it after two months online. Some 3,000 of the 3,200 messages were sent in the first week.
• At the request of our Russian comrades, we’ve now closed down the Valentin Urusov campaign. We may need to revive it later this year, as he is still in jail.
• We will almost certainly have a campaign focussed on India next week (in support of Suzuki workers).  We’re waiting for final approval from the IMF.
• Work on the upcoming Global Solidarity Conference is going well, if a bit behind the scenes at the moment. I have weekly phone conferences with our staffer in Istanbul, Eyup. This Monday, we’ll begin the process of approving who gets subsidies. I have made special efforts in the last week to encourage participation from Jordan, Palestine, Iraq and Georgia.
• We have a much more prominent signup form on our home page now for our mailing list (in English only at the moment). This will be an important feature of our site redesign, which will begin probably just after our conference ends.
• We have a new newswire for Fiji – created at the request of the Australian unions, who are using it.
• I’ve upgraded our Facebook group – not sure exactly what that means, but people now need to be approved to join and there’s a lot more activity there than before.
• UnionBook has reverted to much more staid colors after a pink and purple phase. No one seems to have noticed …

Conference: We’ve jumped from 69 to 85 registrants – and now have 11 from the UK, due to a special mailing I did.  The Solidarity Center is now telling us we should have 8 participants from 4 Arab countries as well.

Campaigns: Vale Colombia is now closed.  Malawi one should launch today.

Newswires: I’ve been doing a lot of work on the regional newswires, which had not been working for a very long time.  Most of them are now working fine.  I’ll give a full update when complete.

Absence: Early warning – I will be away from my desk from 15-30 August with only very limited email access (and none at all during the first week).

In the last four days, in addition to watching our Palestine campaign grow, showing off our new conference poster, and and thinking about Cafe Press (see earlier posts), here are a few of the things that have been on the agenda at LabourStart this week …

1. Have been holding an email conversation with our internet service provider (1&1) about the possible listing of their IP address in the SORBS spam database – some people sending off protest messages to Georgia have received reports that indicate this. Still investigating what’s going on.
2. Attended a meeting at the Trades Union Congress to discuss Egypt and expressed a willingness to do more – including a possible campaign in support of labour law reform in that country.
3. Fixed the newswire which is now featured on LabourStart’s French page on Facebook to open links in a new window (as is the case for the campaigns newswire).
4. Received another nice donation from a Canadian union, processed it and had Derek thank them.
5. Spoke with the International Metalworkers Federation about a possible campaign on Malawi – but after consulting with the ITUC, this has been placed on hold.
6. Provided advice on social networking to UNI, which is campaigning against Deutsche Telekom – a union-buster in the USA.
7. Mailed all members of UnionBook about our conference, the campaigns, and the need to recruit some 900 new members in 40 days.
8. Improved daily campaign stats program to show only the current month; could not get it to show in reverse order.
9. Backed up mailing lists, MySQL databases, and all files on the website.
10. Added campaign supporters to MailChimp lists.
11. Removed spam signups to the conference database.
12. Updated conference website with the Turkish version of the ‘respect’ form.
13. Sorted out tickets for travel to Istanbul in September for a meeting with our conference committee.
14. Sent out the weekly mailing in German.
15. Sent out a mailing to over 600 Francophone Canadians.
16. And answered dozens and dozens of emails.