Inside LabourStart

I spent Thursday and Friday last week as the guest of the South West TUC, which was holding a major conference (150 participants) involving the whole range of British unions.  I conducted two short workshops on online campaigning, signed up a whole bunch of people to our list, and got to hear wonderful feedback about our work — including UnionBook.

Nine days into our ad campaign on Facebook to promote interest in UnionBook, here are the results:

• Our ad was shown 1,984,996 times to Facebook users (in the UK only).
• It was clicked on 572 times.
• The cost to us was US$ 299.76.
• The number of new users picked up through this campaign – UK users who’ve joined in the last few days — is 3.  (We’ve gotten more new users signed up in Canada and Germany during the same period, with no ad campaign and no cost.)
• Price per new user US$ 100.00.

I don’t think this is a judicious use of our money at the moment, and I’ve suspended the campaign.

Stage one was the Facebook ads campaign.  We’ve now shown over a million ads (1,067,344 to be precise), bringing UnionBook over 300 new visitors, some of whom have signed up.

Stage two was to write to all current users (nearly 5,000) plus all those in our Facebook UnionBook group (614 members) to tell them to become active again, that we’ve clobbered the spammers and restored messaging — and that there’s a new UnionBook group in support of the Vale Inco strikers.

The next stage — weekly mailings to UnionBook members telling them what’s new, giving them reason to be active on the site.

This is our new ad appearing on Facebook — if you live in the U.K.

According to Facebook, the ad will be seen by potentially 20 million users over the age of 18.

With the amount we’re prepared to invest in showing the ad, it should be clicked through about 180 times per day, which could generate over time a considerable number of new UnionBook users.

We’re doing this now because we just taken steps to prevent spammers from signing on to UnionBook — all new users must be individually approved, and all must tell us which union they belong to.

We’ve also re-enabled messaging within UnionBook — this is important because, among other things, it allows UnionBook to let us know when new applicants have signed up so that we can promptly approve them.

We’ll run with this ad for a few days and I’ll report back here.

We have six more weeks until the end of the year and I thought I’d share with you some of the things that we’ll be doing in that time:

1. Finalizing the date and venue for our 2010 conference.
2. Launching more campaigns – the next one likely to be another campaign in support of Sinter Metal workers in Turkey.
3. Renewing UnionBook now that we seem to have largely cracked the problem of (new) spammers.  This will include some serious publicity to involve more people, and the launch of new groups.
4. Another survey of our readers — probably once again on the subject of campaigns.
5. Preparation for the launch of our Labour Video of the Year competition — and joint work with the DC Metro Labor Council on databases of labour films and labour film festivals.
6. Announcing the end of the Labour Website of the Year competition.

Spam-free at last?

We’ve had a severe problem of spammers for several months now on UnionBook which has inhibited growth and left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

We’ve tried everything — installing and configuring plugins, calling on the help of the one senior Elgg programmer who’s worked with us before, posted online messages to the Elgg community, written directly to the the authors of the Elgg software, tried to recruit a freelancer who knows Elgg from the elance site, tried to tweak the software ourselves, etc, etc.

Nothing has worked.

However, finally, we have an Elgg programmer on board who is willing to help.  So let’s hope we’re now seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and can get a handle on this problem so that we can move on.

The great majority of new users continue to be spammers and it’s taking a daily effort to ban or delete them.  We were promised a registration plug-in for Elgg by the end of September but that hasn’t happened.  I’ve posted messages to the Elgg community offering to pay for a solution but that hasn’t happened either.  We cannot grow UnionBook until we overcome this problem — and other than trying to find a generic PHP programmer willing to learn Elgg, I don’t have any ideas.  Anyone have a concrete suggestion what to do?

On 23 August, just after our conference in Washington, I posted a report here with some numbers and I’d like to update this about once a month.  Here are today’s totals with the change since August (always increases) in brackets.  Most notable are the very large gains to our number of Twitter followers and our mailing lists (and this is a net gain, as we loose many subscribers each month due to bouncing email addresses):

• Mailing lists – subscribers: 59,000 [+394]
• UnionBook – members: 4,539 [+522]
• Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 2,013 [+21]
• Twitter – followers: 1,571 [+378]
• Correspondents: 687 [+16]
• Union group on Flickr: 491 [+32]