Inside LabourStart

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains (100 or more) are highlighted in bold.

Highlights:

• We now have 10 lists with 1,000 subscribers or more.
• The Dutch list grew by more than 50% – a spectacular growth.
• On Facebook, our Group continues to grow – by over 250 a month – despite no efforts by us to promote it. Within a few days, it will probably even be larger than UnionBook, which is growing very slowly.
• We’re picking 9 – 10 new Twitter followers every day (doing almost nothing to promote this) and as a result, we should reach 10,000 Twitter followers sometime in July.

Mailing lists

English: 80,623 [79,267] +1,356
French: 6,162 [6,046] +116
Spanish: 4,750 [4,660] +90
Italian: 3,990 [3,957] +33
Turkish: 3,279 [3,209] +70
German: 3,199 [2,906] +293
Norwegian: 2,438 [2,407] +31
Russian: 2,046 [1,962] +84
Dutch: 1,320 [879] +441
Chinese: 1,011 [828] +183
Finnish: 573 [560] +13
Japanese: 333 [300] +33
Arabic: 312 [299] +13
Polish: 281 [313] -32
Portuguese: 244 [241] +3
Tagalog: 231 [232] -1
Hebrew: 209 [207] +2
Farsi: 207 [213] -6
Swedish: 196 [178] +18
Korean 153 [154] -1
Danish: 138 [143] -5
Indonesian: 141 [128] +13
Czech: 88 [89] -1
Thai: 68 [67] +1
Esperanto: 50 [39] +11
Vietnamese: 12 [12]

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 9.710 [9,435] +275

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 7,673 [7,172] +501
Members of LabourStart group: 5,433 [5,180] +253
Like LabourStart page (French): 318 [312] +6
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 112 [102] +10
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 83 [75] +8

UnionBook –
Members: 5,557 [5,530] +27

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,348 [1,317] +31

Union group on Flickr: 728 [724] +4

Website

Correspondents: 649 [640] +9

Campaigns
Turkey – This is the big one, likely to become the largest campaign we’ve ever done, and possibly even reach my personal goal of 20,000 messages sent, sometime this week.  Lots of updates below.
Small screen version goes live – Our campaigns now look MUCH better on smartphones and tablets, a first example of “responsive web design” on LabourStart, with more to come.

Berlin 2014
Edd and I drafted a very short document explaining what we’re hoping to achieve in Berlin at next year’s LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference.  We’ll be having a phone call with the ITUC today and a meeting with Gisela, who is based in Berlin, in two weeks, in London.

Publicity
We’ve been running a Facebook ad campaign for nearly 3 weeks now.  It’s cost us $288.00, the ads have been seen by 68,389 people in the UK and Germany, and we’ve picked up 677 new ‘likes’.  As a result of this, we now have 1,694 likes from the UK and 185 from Germany — making it our 6th strongest country.
As reported below, we got good publicity in the German/Austrian Esperanto magazine.

Books
Book sales continue to be slow.  In June, we sold only 19 copies of the Global Labour Movement book, and 4 of Campaigning and Winning (all in English).

Site traffic
As reported below, we’ve started using Clicky to provide real-time updates on traffic to our sites.  It was quite fun to watch a world map light up when we launched the Turkey campaign.

Internationalization
We’ve identified 11 “dormant languages” on our news pages where correspondents have ceased to be active.  We prioritized six of these (Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Portuguese, Farsi, Italian) and have posted a message on each one explaining that the page is not currently being updated, but asking for volunteers to help.  We’ve also begun writing to each mailing list in these languages and have already gotten some new correspondents.
We have been able to do those mailings and post messages in those languages because we have picked up a number of new volunteer translators.  We did this by writing to people from different countries who had signed up to the English language version of our Turkey campaign.  As a result, we have an unprecedented 24 languages for the Turkey campaign.
Finally, we continue to constantly update our news pages.  Most recently, our French-language Canada page is shaping up well, with top stories now for the first time.

Events
We now have a proper form to submit events and people have begun submitting them.  We’ll set this up so that events for specific countries are automatically sent by email to the appropriate editors who will decide what to post.  We’ll begin publicity to all our correspondents and subscribers once things quiet down a bit here …

As part of my general de-Googling of my life, I thought I’d look into alternatives to Google Analytics — not that we’ve been using that all that much.

Clicky got some good reviews so I’m experimenting with its use on our site.  After a day or two, I’ll tell you what it tells us — and how it compares to what 1&1 Internet’s stats program tells us.

At the moment, it’s just fun to watch …

The Global Labour Movement – An Introduction: We completed work on this book which is now with CreateSpace. We’ll soon be approving the proof and will begin selling the book by May Day.

New site design: This is now working in 24 of our 29 languages. It’s also working for all country pages in English as well as the state/province pages.

CloudFlare teething problems: It turned out that we really needed to tell CloudFlare about all our sub-domains, even the ones that they are not handling with their proxy servers. Once that was done, everything seems to have settled down.

Campaigns – new: At the request of the ITF, we launched a second campaign within a week, this time in support of workers in the Port of Vancouver, Washington. With 8,457 supporters, it’s already larger than the Hong Kong campaign (8,235).

Campaigns – renewed: The ITUC asked us to give the Turkey campaign another big push. We did. It went up from 11,098 to 12,549 in the last five days.  The KMU also asked us to reopen their campaign for a few more days and we’ve done so.

Campaigns – closed: At the request of the RMT, we’ve closed the Churchill’s campaign, which the workers have won, and the Bakerloo campaign as well. I’ll be closing the Korea campaign tomorrow, after 3 months online. It’s had 10,540 supporters.

Campaigns – overhaul: There is a VERY long list of things to do here, and I’ll be trying to make some progress every day on the list. Starting with the migration of our old flat database to a proper MySQL database. This should make the campaigns work faster, be more stable, easier for translators to do their work, etc.

May Day party in London: We have over 215 people who either say they are coming or may be coming; this is very good. We’ll have entertainers and guest speakers from a couple of London disputes, as well as the general secretary of the ITF. Details here.

Fundraising: I put in a proposal to a UK-based funding group which supports social change, the Edge Fund . We won’t know until July if our application is successful.

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains are highlighted in bold.

Key developments:

• We’ve moved from MailChimp to Sendy for nearly all our lists now.
• We now have 28 mailing list languages.
• 20 of those lists have 100 or more subscribers.  We are currently mailing to all 20 of those lists.
• The 8 small lists are Indonesian, Czech, Esperanto, Bulgarian, Greek, Creole, Vietnamese and Tagalog.
• The number of correspondents has dropped dramatically (308 so far) as we get rid of the completely inactive ones.

Mailing lists

Total for all lists: 103,324 [104,515]

1. English: 75,280 [75,213]
2. French: 5,922 [5,932]
3. Spanish: 4,392 [4,356]
4. Italian: 3,889 [3,879]
5. Turkish: 3,106 [3,111]
6. German: 2,586 [2,551]
7. Norwegian: 2,344 [2,333]
8. Russian: 1,935 [1,949]
9. Dutch: 803 [781]
10. Chinese: 708 [629]
11. Polish: 312 [310]
12. Portuguese: 243 [243]
13. Arabic: 231 [184]
14. Japanese: 230 [ 209]
15. Hebrew: 208 [208]
16. Farsi: 206 [201]
17. Finnish: 187 [186]
18. Swedish: 183 [185]
19. Danish: 144 [146]
20. Korean 143 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,417 [5,389]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 6,098 [5,877]
Members of LabourStart group: 4,884 [4,849]
Like LabourStart page (French): 267 [245]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 87 [74]

Twitter followers –
English: 8,441 [8,115]

Union group on Flickr: 719 [718]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,153 [1,114]

Website

Correspondents: 741 [1,049]
Site visits: 597,018 [599,459]

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains are highlighted in bold.

Mailing lists
Total for all lists: 104,515 [104,764]

English: 75,213 [75,686]
French: 5,932 [5,857]
Spanish: 4,356 [4,337]
Italian: 3,879 [3,879]
Turkish: 3,111 [3,112]
German: 2,551 [2,549]
Norwegian: 2,333 [2,328]
Russian: 1,949 [1,948]
Dutch: 781 [740]
Chinese: 629 [553]
Polish: 310 [310]
Portuguese: 243 [243]
Japanese: 209 [ 209]
Hebrew: 208 [207]
Farsi: 201 [201]
Finnish: 186 [186]
Swedish: 185 [186]
Arabic: 184 [183]
Danish: 146 [146]

And just below the radar:

Korean 93 [93]
Indonesian 84 [81]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,389 [5,371]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 5,877 [5,715]
Members of LabourStart group: 4,849 [4,824]
Like LabourStart page (French): 245 [240]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 74 [72]

Twitter followers –
English: 8,115 [7,921]

Union group on Flickr: 718 [712]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,114 [1,100]

Website

Correspondents: 1,049 [1,043]
Site visits: 599,459

The mailing lists grew by a net total of 587, which is not bad. The three largest growths were English (up by 292), French (up 48) and Hebrew (up 18 – a gain of 10%).

Our Facebook page also shot up by 261 new likes this month, a gain of 5%. The Facebook page is growing 7 times as fast as the Facebook group, and today has nearly 1,000 more members.

The largest gain, however, was the growth in followers on Twitter – up by 318 in the last month, and now just under 8,000.

Mailing lists

Total for all lists: 104,764 [104,177] +587

English: 75,686 [75,394] +292
French: 5,857 [5,809] +48
Spanish: 4,337 [4,329] +8
Italian: 3,879 [3,884]
Turkish: 3,112 [3,111] +1
German: 2,549 [2,538] +11
Norwegian: 2,328 [2,329]
Russian: 1,948 [1,949]
Dutch: 740 [740]
Chinese: 553 [551] +2
Polish: 310 [310]
Portuguese: 243 [244] +1
Japanese: 209 [ 209]
Hebrew: 207 [189] +18
Farsi: 201 [201]
Finnish: 186 [184] +2
Swedish: 186 [186]
Arabic: 183 [177] +6
Danish: 146 [146]

And just below the radar:

Korean 93 [93]
Indonesian 81 [76] +5

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,371 [5,342] +29

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 5,715 [5,454] +261
Members of LabourStart group: 4,824 [4,787] +37
Like LabourStart page (French): 240 [237] +3
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 72 [71] +1

Twitter followers –
English: 7,921 [7,603] +318

Union group on Flickr: 712 [709] +3

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,100 [1,054] +46

Website

Correspondents: 1,043 [1,042]

This is 10 days late because I was away during the first week of October. There are no website stats this time because I wasn’t able to access them this morning and didn’t want to delay publication of this report any further.

Some highlights:

Net growth of mailing lists is still strong, with over 2,500 new subscribers this month. The biggest gain was the English list, which picked up a net gain of over 2,000. I’m now listing Indonesian at the bottom as we’re doing regular mailings to this small list, and running regular campaigns in Indonesian now.

On Facebook, likes to our page continue to grow considerably faster than membership in our group, which is what we want. This month we had a gain of 333 new likes to the page and only 6 new members of the group.

Twitter is growing more slowly, up only 251 this month, but we still have far more followers on Twitter than we have likes on Facebook. (7,418 Twitter followers vs 5,289 fans on Facebook).

On LinkedIn, despite no effort by us, we’ve now soared past the 1,000 barrier, having picked up 46 new members of our group there. That’s only one fewer than the number of new members of UnionBook (which grew by only 47 during this period).

Mailing lists

Total for all lists: 104,296 [101,775]

English: 75,597 [73,544]
French: 5,813 [5,777]
Spanish: 4,338 [4,177]
Italian: 3,872 [3,868]
Turkish: 3,114 [2,989]
German: 2,546 [2,497]
Norwegian: 2,344 [2,301]
Russian: 1,950 [1,945]
Dutch: 739 [738]
Chinese: 503 [500]
Polish: 308 [306]
Portuguese: 244 [243]
Japanese: 209 [ 209]
Farsi: 201 [201]
Hebrew: 189 [177]
Swedish: 187 [189]
Finnish: 184 [184]
Arabic: 169 [160]
Danish: 150 [153]

And just below the radar:

Korean 93 [93]
Indonesian 74

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,322 [5,275]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 5,289 [4,956]
Members of LabourStart group: 4,778 [4,772]
Like LabourStart page (French): 234 [222]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 67 [60]

Twitter followers –
English: 7,418 [7,167]

Union group on Flickr: 701 [698]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,037 [991]

Website

Correspondents: 1,028 [1,013]

Highlights this month –

Though August is traditionally a quiet month, and this is reflected in the lack of growth for the top mailing lists, we had a huge growth in our Turkish list (up by more than 50%, a gain of over 1,000 subscribers) and the German list grew by 202 subscribers, a gain of nearly 10%. In social networks, we’re rapidly approaching 5,000 ‘likes’ for our Facebook page in English, with another nearly 300 in French and Turkish. We’re just under 1,000 members of our LinkedIn group – which we’ve done absolutely nothing to publicize. We’re finally over 1,000 correspondents (and will need to soon starting weeding out the inactive ones). Finally, visits to the website soared for some reason in August, with a gain of almost 20% in unique visits and an additional 150,000 page views compared to July.

Mailing lists

Total for all lists: 101,775 [100,331]

English: 73,544 [73,474]
French: 5,777 [5,777]
Spanish: 4,177 [4,163]
Italian: 3,868 [3,873]
Turkish: 2,989 [1,897]
German: 2,497 [2,292]
Norwegian: 2,301 [2,281]
Russian: 1,945 [1,947]
Dutch: 738 [736]
Chinese: 500 [496]
Polish: 306 [306]
Portuguese: 243 [247]
Japanese: 209 [ 209]
Farsi: 201 [186]
Swedish: 189 [194]
Finnish: 184 [184]
Hebrew: 177 [157]
Danish: 153 [156]
Arabic: 160 [156]

And just below the radar:

Korean 93 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,275 [5,227]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 4,956 [4,787]
Members of LabourStart group: 4,772 [4,762]
Like LabourStart page (French): 222 [213]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 60

Twitter followers –
English: 7,167 [6,920]

Union group on Flickr: 698 [694]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 991 [951]

Website

Correspondents: 1,013 [994]

Unique visits to the site this month : 599,990 [509,378]
Peak day: 23,064 [23.8.12]
Page views this month: 1,312,682 [1,164,243]

Headline news –

• We finally break the 100,000 mark in our mailing lists.
• Our Turkish list grew by 50% – now just under 2,000 addresses.
• The Spanish list grew by 10% and has moved up to third place.
• On Facebook, the number of people who like our page now finally exceeds the number who are members of our group. The number of members of UnionBook is bigger than each of these.
• We’re a month away from our LinkedIn group having more than 1,000 members – with no promotion at all from us.
• We’re also just shy of 1,000 volunteer correspondents.

Mailing lists

Total for all lists: 100,331 [97,538]

1. English: 73,474 [72,889]
2. French: 5,777 [5,701]
3. Spanish: 4,163 [3,857]
4. Italian: 3,873 [3,876]
5. Norwegian: 2,281 [2,424]
6. German: 2,292 [2,280]
7. Russian: 1,947 [1,738]
8. Turkish: 1,897 [1,280]
9. Dutch: 736 [736]
10. Chinese: 496 [488]
11. Polish: 306 [306]
12. Portuguese: 247 [247]
13. Japanese: 209 [ 209]
14. Swedish: 194 [196]
15. Farsi: 186 [190]
16. Finnish: 184 [184]
17. Danish: 156 [158]
18. Hebrew 157 [155]
19. Arabic: 156 [140]

And just below the radar:

Korean 93 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,227 [5,190]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 4,787 [4,666]
Members of LabourStart group: 4,762 [4,767]
Like LabourStart page (French): 213 [201]

Twitter followers –
English: 6,920 [6,719]

Union group on Flickr: 694 [693]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 951 [913]

Website

Correspondents: 994 [985]

Unique visits to the site this month : 509,378 [547,625]
Peak day: 21,706 [27.7.12]
Page views this month: 1,164,243 [1,206,879]