Inside LabourStart

Campaigns book: Andy is working on a translation into French.  The Kindle edition should go live today.  Sales are now well over 400.  Two parts of the book are about to be reprinted in Social Policy magazine whose editor, Wade Rathke, the founder of ACORN, loved the book.

Campaigns: We launched new campaigns in support of workers in the Philippines and El Salvador.  We closed down the Mexico and China campaigns.

ActNOW DIY: Made a lot of progress on this – hopefully will have something to show before the month is up.

Newswires: We have working newswires in RSS format now for all regions – Europe, Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Central America, the Caribbean, South America and the Middle East.  A number of new unions have signed up to use the newswires – we’ve been writing to local and branch unions, especially in the UK.

Correspondents: Some – a small number – of the inactive ones are coming back asking for passwords.  We’ve now written individually to every inactive correspondent and will gradually begin deleting those who are inactive and don’t respond.  A couple of new correspondents have come on board, from Finland and Canada this week.

Talks: Eric spoke to Southend-on-Sea Labour Party on Saturday; this week, on Thursday, Edd speaks at the Unions 21 event in London.

At a meeting of the Southend-on-Sea Labour Party yesterday at which I spoke, I sold all ten copies of our book.  I could have sold more if I’d realized that everyone in the room wanted a copy.

Overall sales have been quite good – the book is less than a month old and we’ve already sold 424 copies – an increase of 47 in the last five days.

In addition, we gave away 33 copies to our translators, major donors and journalists, so the total number of copies we’ve distributed so far is 457.

Public appearances in the UK: We’ll be represented at three upcoming UK-based events.  On 19.1, I’ll be speaking at the Southend Labour Party. On 24.1, Edd will speak at the Unions 21 tech seminar. And on 13-14 March, we’re organizing a panel at the E-Campaigning Forum in Oxford.

Campaigns: We’re about to launch two new ones today – on El Salvador and the Philippines.  These are our first new campaigns in nearly 6 weeks — it has been a very quiet season.  As reported below, we now have the campaigns newswire working correctly in 19 languages, in both JavaScript and RSS versions – please make sure to promote this in your country.

Book: Sales have reached 377.  Let’s all push hard to get that number up to 500 over the next few days.  We were briefly an Amazon.co.uk best-seller, hitting the top 1,000 books they were selling, and reaching number 2 in our category.  A Kindle edition is coming soon, and we’re starting to think about doing another book.  Meanwhile, I expect to complete my book for UCS by the end of January – the working title is  Making Unions Stronger – Using The Internet Better.

Labour Newswire: We’ve pushed our newswires aggressively to UK unions, and it’s bearing fruit.  We had 40 UK sites listed, that dropped down to 20 after Edd removed all the dead wood, and now we’re back up to 28. You can see the up-to-date list of all 302 sites using our newswire here.

Today in Labour History: We now have 11 people adding content to this; almost every day, there is something on our front page in English.   (And more things coming soon.)

Inactive correspondents: Edd has gone through the 500 or so correspondents who’ve not been active, writing individually to each one, and giving support (such as new passwords) where needed.  In a few weeks, we’ll be deleting those who are showing no interest in continuing.

Upcoming global solidarity conferences: I’ve finally heard (today) from a colleague in Germany about the possibility of a conference in Berlin in May 2014; I’ll be following up.  Derek has been in discussions with people in Vancouver about a conference there in late 2014.

Fund-raising: We’ve gotten generous donations from two unions in the USA (United Steelworkers and the Amalgamated Transportation Union) and hoping for more.  We’ve sent out a few copies of the campaigns book to donors who have given £1,000 or more in the last couple of years.

Book: We completed our campaigns book and published it, and publicized it today.

Campaigns: We closed the Guatemala campaign two weeks ago – still waiting for a report on how things turned out.  The Zimbabwe campaign was closed ten days ago.  The Histadrut has asked us about doing a campaign in support of striking Pelephone workers in Israel.

Newswires: We located the RSS version of the health & safety newswire for Australia which the ACTU had requested.

ActNOW DIY: Did some work on writing the code for this – moving slowly …

Site overhaul: Did a considerable amount of work on the new-look website for 2013.  Coming soon.

International Union Rights: Sales of subs to this were disappointing – we sold just 34 of them (as of 10 days ago).

Today in Labour History: This is now working fairly well, and displaying on our home page.  We have 4 or so people adding content and will soon go public in an attempt to get more correspondents.

Twitter: We are working to get our Spanish language Twitter feed working again and we’re exploring ways to get all our languages working.

Inactive correspondents: We’re building up a list of all those correspondents who are inactive and are beginning to write to each one individually.

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.

I’ve now closed the survey which got 490 responses out of about 1,700 people who were asked to participate — an extraordinarily high rate of response, which is good and shows that people are interested in what we do and that there may well be reason to continue selling books to trade unionists.  You can see a summary of the results here (there is no password protection here as it doesn’t show the nearly 300 individual comments).

In this short post, I want to focus on next steps — on things we should be considering in light of what we have learned.

As so many people commented on the price UCS was charging (and other problems, such as the lack of information about the book), I decided to look at a couple of alternatives — the unionized Powells book shop  and Amazon, both of which were for years our partners in selling books.

UCS sells the book for $17.95, Powells for $12.50 and Amazon for $12.24.  Powells also offers free shipping on orders of $50 or more.  (UCS charges the full price for shipping.

LabourStart earns 10% on a UCS sale, so make $1.79 on every title sold.  Powells pays 7.5%, so had we sold the books there, we’d have made $1.35 for each one sold.

As Amazon is an anti-union company, it may be worth considering doing some or all of our books of the month with Powells.  Or dealing directly with publishers.

Because many of the people who responded do not live in the USA, we need to into options that are cost-effective for them.  We’re already exploring UK bookstores, but need to look into other options.

Please post any of your thoughts on this subject as comments here.  Thanks.

I asked our intern, Edd, to write up a summary of what he learned from reading through the survey and the hundreds of comments — here’s what he came up with:

The most common comments are:

It’s too expensive with shipping costs for people outside the USA.

Problems with PayPal, especially for people who don’t have credit cards.

A lot of people complain that they can’t see a preview of the book – like a page or an image from it. I think people expect to be able to see this more and more before they make an online purchase.
People seem to want more information generally, for example on shipping charges, or how much the US dollar price is equivalent to in their own currency. Also a lot of people wanted to know the age range it was appropriate for (saying “children’s book” is apparently not specific enough).

The significant number of people saying they were undecided (32%) suggests that reminders might be worthwhile, as long as we weren’t spamming people.

Quite a few people saying they don’t buy books through the internet. There’s not much we can do about that, except (thinking for the UK) if we had a partnership with a bookshop that has a physical presence, we can point people to that bookshop to give them the option of buying it there.

A few people said they wanted their local library to stock it – could we make an effort to sell to libraries? In fact a number of respondents to the survey said that had talked to their local libraries about stocking it, so maybe this is something we can encourage people to do in future mailouts?

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.

48 hours after I sent out the mailing about our second LabourStart Labour Book of the Month, we had almost 1,800 (of 75,000) people click through to learn more about the book.

But of those 1,800, only 25 actually bought copies.  In other words, more than 98% of those who clicked through and looked at the book decided not to buy it — or not to buy it immediately.

We can speculate from now until the end of time about why people aren’t buying the book (the price of shipping outside the USA comes to mind), but we can also do something better thanks to fabulous tools like MailChimp and SurveyMonkey.

We can actually ask those 1,800 people — and only them — why they didn’t buy the book.

I did that this morning.

Their answers have just started to come in.  Anyone who wants to know the results, email me and I’ll send you the link to follow the poll in real time.

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.