Inside LabourStart

We’ve just completed the second annual survey of trade union use of the net and by any measure it was a huge success. I think we’ve learned a lot — and now we need to apply the lessons we’re learning.

Last year’s survey was relatively large (for us) with 1,336 respondents; this year, we got more than twice that number — 2,954.

And last year we did the survey in English only; this year we did both English and French versions.

Full results of the survey are now available here.  You will need a password to view them; email me for it.

Here are some highlights:

WHO RESPONDED TO THE SURVEY

First of all, who responded? The English survey which had 2,605 responses, came largely from these countries (numbers in parentheses are from last year):

UK 670 (260), Canada 493 (236), USA 405 (243), Australia 319 (167), New Zealand 83 (39) and Ireland 72 (45).

Most respondents to the French survey came from:
Canada 127, France 72, and Belgium 66.

Here are the responses to key questions:

HOW WE ACCESS THE NET

The biggest change since last year is the massive jump – more than a tripling – of those using tablets, with another huge jump in the number of smartphone users. With one in seven people surveyed now using a table computer to access the net, it means that unions should take that into account, creating either websites which are suited for a tablet display, or apps specifically designed to run on Android or iOS. Unions in Francophone countries seem to lag behind on this matter – for now.

Devices used to access the net:

(The first number is from the 2012 survey in English. The number in parentheses are from the 2011 survey. The number after that is from the 2012 survey in French.)

Desktop computer 77.7% (79.2%) 79%
Laptop, notebook or netbook 68.5% (70.8%) 64.6%
Smartphone 41.6% (31.4%) 21%
Tablet 14.3% (4.3%) 9.3%
Other 2.3% (2.6%) 3.1%

As for browsers, Internet Explorer’s share continues to fall, but there was also a significant fall for Firefox. The big winners are Chrome and Safari. Unions must take into account that websites designed to work on Internet Explorer on desktop PCs that do not render in correctly in other browsers are a problem. We are back in one sense to the 1990s when there were different browsers (remember Netscape?) that we needed to design for. Union websites must be tested on multiple browsers and on multiple devices (desktop computer, tablet, phone).

Web browsers used:

Microsoft Internet Explorer 63.7% (67.1%) 59.5%
Mozilla Firefox 45.4% (51.5%) 47.6%
Google Chrome 36.5% (26.7%) 32.7%
Safari 23.4% (18.6%) 16%
Other 4.6% (5.2%) 4.4%
Opera 3.4% (4.8%) 3.4%
Konqueror 0.3% (0.6%) 0.3%

SOCIAL NETWORKS

Facebook remains the king here, but a surprise was the sudden jump in use of LinkedIn by trade unionists, with more than one in three now saying they use it. This is not the case with Francophones, who hardly use it at all. Twitter experienced a big gain — though this is not reflected in the French survey. UnionBook suffered a sharp decline in the last year. Social networks which used to compete on Facebook’s terrain such as MySpace, Orkut and Bebo now combined represent less than one tenth of Facebook’s reach. Second Life, for which some unions once invested a great deal of time and money, seems to have evaporated. In next year’s survey, we’ll make sure to include Google+ — which is clearly a hit among Francophone trade unionists, with more than one in four of them using it.

Members of which social networks:

Facebook 88.1% (88.1%) 77.6%
LinkedIn 37.5% (29.1%) 8.3%
Twitter 37.4% (32.5%) 15.4%
YouTube 35.3% (36.2%) 31.1%
UnionBook 24.1% (56%) 1.8%
Flickr 10.9% (13.5%) 1.3%
Other 10.3% (10.3%) 14%
MySpace 6.3% (11.4%) 2.2%
Second Life 1.6% (2.1%) 0.4%
Bebo 1.3% (1.2%) 0.4%
Orkut 0.5% (2%) —

Only asked in the French survey:

Google+ 27.6%

Participate in specifically trade union groups in these social networks:

Yes 56.2% (63.7%) 58.3%
No 43.8% (36.3%) 41.7%

Your union has a presence in the networks you belong to?

Yes 58% (58.8%) 57.9%
No 13.6% (15.4%) 17.6%
Don’t know 28.3% (25.7%) 24.5%

Unions are making more use of Facebook and Twitter than before, and this is true for both English and French speaking countries. Union use of LinkedIn appears to be quite limited, despite the very large number of trade unionists signed up to this social network. Unions should consider forming groups on LinkedIn and using it as an additional publishing platform, as well as discussion forum. As the French survey shows, Google+ is playing a significant role, with quite a few unions — at least in Francophone countries — now using it.

Social networks where your union has a presence

Facebook 90.2% (86.6%) 85.1%
Twitter 42.1% (33.5%) 28%
YouTube 24.6% (24.7%) 21.1%
UnionBook 10.5% (21.7%) 1.7%
Other 7.8% (9.3%) 15.4%
LinkedIn 7.7% (4.9%) 4.6%
MySpace 1.3% (2.4%)

Only asked in the French survey:

Google+ 9.1%

UNION WEBSITES

As one would suspect, nearly all national unions have websites, but as we will see, only one in five respondents visits them daily — and that number fell considerably in the last year.

National union has a website?

Yes 91.7% (92.9%) 90.4%
No 3.6% (3.3%) 4.1%
Don’t know 4.8% (3.8%) 5.5%

How often do you visit it?

Sometimes 67.2% (64.1%)
Daily 21.2% (27.1%) 26.4%
Never 11.7% (8.8%) 8.3%

Only asked in the French survey:

Weekly 29.2%
Monthly 6.9%

How would you rate it?

Good 49.8% (50.9%) 57.6%
Average 27.7% (26%) 22.9%
Excellent 13.3% (13.7%) 12.2%
Fair 4.8% (6.1%) 6.5%
Poor 4.4% (3.3%) 0.8%

LOCAL UNIONS AND THE NET

The story with local and branch unions is somewhat different. Far fewer of them seem to have websites. In many cases, people don’t know if they do. And they visit them rarely, with a significant number saying they never visit them at all. Clearly unions must make additional efforts to improve the quality of local union websites to bring them up to the level of the national sites.

Local branch union has a website?

Yes 51.6% (54.5%) 53.5%
No 33.7% (35%) 32.6%
Don’t know 14.6% (10.5%) 13.9%

How often do you visit it?

Sometimes 53.7% (53.4%) 20.8%
Never 32.5% (28.1%) 27.8%
Daily 13.8% (18.5%) 18.5%

Only asked in the French survey:

Weekly 21.3%
Monthly 11.6%

How would you rate it?

Good 37.8% (36.6%) 46.6%
Average 28% (29.9%) 29.2%
Poor 14.6% (13.1%) 7.3%
Excellent 11.4% (8.8%) 12.4%
Fair 8.3% (11.6%) 4.5%

APPS FOR SMARTPHONES AND TABLES

In spite of the huge jump in the numbers of trade unionists using smartphones and tablets, there has hardly been an increase in the union presence on these devices. And the ratings given by those who do use existing union apps are quite low — one in three in the English speaking survey rating their union app as fair or poor, and fully 41% of those responding to the French survey rating the union app as poor. We seem to back to the mid-1990s when union websites were often quite poor, especially when compared to other websites then coming on the scene. Union apps need to match other, similar apps in quality. In other words, it’s not enough to invest in creating an app. The app must be useful for members.

Your union has an app for smartphones or tablets?

Yes 5.8% (4.5%) 4.6%
No 38.1% (42.5%) 46.6%
Don’t know 56.1% (53%) 48.8%

If your union has an app, do you use it?

No 82% (83.9%) 83%
Yes 18% (16.1%) 17%

How would you rate it?

Average 28.4% (22.8%)
Poor 27.6% (27.6%) 41.4%
Good 25.8% (31.5%) 13.8%
Excellent 12.9% (11%) 3.4%
Fair 5.3% (7.1%) —

EMAIL NEWSLETTERS

Unions in both the French and English surveys, over both years, make wide use of email newsletters and members seem largely satisfied with these. Unions should never underestimate the importance of these messages. While investing in the latest social media fad (like Second LIfe) may seem ‘cool’, members want to receive information in their email inboxes and unions must continue to invest in getting this right.

You receive regular email messages from your union?

Yes 78.1% (78.8%) 83.8%
No 21.9% (21.2%) 16.2%

How would you rate those messages?

Good 55.8% (54.2%) 57.9%
Excellent 21.7% (21.7%) 25.2%
Average 16.3%(18.2%) 12.8%
Fair 3.2% (3.7%) 2.5%
Poor 3% (2.2%) 1.7%

MULTIMEDIA

Members seem pleased with video and audio content produced by their unions. Though it appears that barely half of all unions produce multimedia for the net, despite the widespread use of broadband connections which make this accessible to all.

Union produces multimedia content for the net?

Yes 54.7% (57%) 54.7%
Don’t know 27.6% (20.6%) 18.6%
No 17.7% (20.6%) 26.7%

How would you rate that content?

Good 50.5%( 50.1%) 59.8%
Excellent 22.2% (17.9%) 18.9%
Average 19.2% (24.3%) 15.2%
Poor 4.8% (4.6%) 3%
Fair 3.4% (3.1%) 3%

USEFUL SITES AND SERVICES

Of the five sites we named last year, four declined in popularity — with the decline of UnionBook being quite dramatic. (Only LabourStart held its own.) Radio Labour also fell by half, and is now only rated as useful by 6% of respondents. In some cases, I’m convinced that respondents were checking out these sites for the first time — we gave the URLs as part of the survey. It’s great to see that more than a third found the ILO website useful, but it’s hard to believe that they were regular visitors to it before the survey. One hopes that the survey will raise the awareness of great sites like Radio Labour, UnionJobs and the Global Labour Column, and that next year we might see these increase in popularity.

Useful pro-union websites and services

(Not asked in this form on the French survey)

LabourStart 94.7% (93.3%)
ILO 34%
UnionBook 21.8% (48%)
ITUC 20.8%
Global Unions 13.4%
UnionJobs 10.2% (15.2%)
Union Communication Services 7% (12.9%)
Radio Labour 6.3% (12.5%)
New Unionism Network 5.7%
Global Labour Column 4.5%

-end-

Improvements to ActNOW campaigns: There’s now a new field for inputting the photo which will accompany each campaign.  This will be very useful for the front page redesign (every campaign needs a photo) and the new app (see below).  The field we use for entering details about our partners is now partially filled in to make it easier for people; I will be writing to all campaign translators about this.

App for tablets and smartphones: I’ve made some real progress on this.  There’s really only one or two more things to do before we launch, which I aim to do by the end of February.  If you’re interesting in seeing what we have already, email me and I’ll send you a link to a web app that approximates the final version.

Twitter: I’ve been aggressively promoting the various versions and there’s a steady flow of people signing up as followers. In the last 3 days, the English Twitter account has picked up 76 new followers, and the Canadian Twitter account even more.

Interface for correspondents: For some time now we’ve had English, French and Russian versions of this — today I requested our translators in several other languages to translate a short file which will make things easier for our nearly 1,000 volunteer correspondents, many of whom do not have English as their first language.

Conference 2012: Andrew and I have had regular Skype calls; we’ve set up a Basecamp account from which we manage everything; we have a venue (thanks to the NSWTF) in Sydney and we have the beginnings of an organizing committee.

Conference 2014: I’ve had discussions with a potential LabourStart staff person for Germany to even now begin the work of raising our profile there, which is a pre-condition for a successful conference in May 2014 in Berlin.  I’ve also made tentative plans to meet with the ITUC in Brussels next month to discuss this and other issues.  They are aware of our intention to hold our Global Solidarity Conference on the eve of their congress.

Fundraising: We normally do a pitch to our readers in May, and we will do this, but I’ve been approaching unions even now to begin the work as our expenses are skyrocketing and we need to raise more money than ever before.  Derek and Andrew have done terrific work in the past in Canada and Australia; I’ve gotten some great commitments from British unions this year.  Anyone reading this who can help – please email me.

Tech problems – newsfeeds and Unicode: We’ve had problems with the Finnish RSS news feed – some characters not rendering correctly – I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to get this to work. If the solution I’ve deployed solves the problems, I’ll sort this out for all other languages as well.

Broken link on our home page: Derek noticed that the ‘Join a union’ link had stopped working suddenly.  This turns out to be our only program written in Python.  I have no idea what has gone wrong, but have contacted our web host, 1&1 Internet, and they’ll look into it.

Wikipedia: I update our page there every month, both adding new links, numbers and campaigns, and also monitoring to make sure the page isn’t vandalized.  Many people visit this page and we need to treat it as an important gateway to the LabourStart project.

New campaigns on the horizon: In the last 24 hours we’ve had three requests – from the USA, Peru and Italy.  We’ll see if we can find a way to stagger these and not overload our lists.

Every language where we regularly post campaigns now has a Twitter feed as a way to build interest in and support for those campaigns.

And if we have a home page in that language, there’s now a prominent link  to Twitter there showing how many followers the feed has.  All the feeds now have RSS versions, and Twitterfeed accounts which stream up to 5 new campaigns every 24 hours.

We should have a look to make sure this works correctly 24 hours after the next campaign launch.

The languages are English, French, Japanese, German, Norwegian, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, Korean, Chinese and Portuguese.

Some headlines:

1. Five of the top six mailing lists have grown very well in the last month – especially Italian, Spanish and Russian which grew by a combined total of almost 2,500.
2. All the other mailing lists have pretty much stagnated, though we have hopes for a big growth of the Dutch list this month.
3. UnionBook and the LabourStart page on Facebook continue to grow, albeit slowly. The former has picked up another 85 members while the latter has grown by over 150 new people.
4. We’re expanding our presence on Twitter, with new Japanese and German feeds already introduced and many more on the way. The English one is growing at the rate of about 200 new followers per month.
5. There’s been a huge boost — expected post-Christmas — in the number of unique visitors to the site. We’re now looking at something like 640,000 unique visitors per month.
6. The LinkedIn group – with no promotion whatsoever – continues to grow at the rate of 10% per month, and now has over 600 members.

Here are the totals with the last month (January 2012) in brackets (large gains – 100+ – in bold face):

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

English: 67,414 [66,576]
French: 3,781 [3,582]
Italian: 3,076 [2,420]
Spanish: 3,051 [2,115]
Norwegian: 2,357 [2,333]
Russian: 1,600 [712]
German: 1,534 [1,516]
Turkish: 787 [778]
Polish: 304 [304]
Chinese: 276 [276]
Portuguese: 245 [245]
Dutch: 237 [236]
Finnish: 183 [183]
Swedish: 180 [182]
Japanese: 137 [137]
Danish: 107 [107]

And just below the radar:

Arabic 97 [89]
Hebrew 96 [96]
Korean 93 [93]
Farsi 93 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook 2.0 – members: 4,875 [4,790]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,711 [4,714]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 3,615 [3,462]
Like LabourStart page (French): 108 [96]

Twitter followers –
English: 5,383 [5,180]
French: 90 [85]
Japanese: 15 [0]
German: 1 [0]

Union group on Flickr: 674 [673]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 607 [551]

Website

Correspondents: 948 [940]

Unique visits to the site this month : 638,240 [597,481]
Peak day: 26,170 – 27.1.12
Page views this month: 1,301,326 [1,370,129 ]

We’ve had Twitter feeds in English (5,368 followers) and French (90 followers)  for some time now; this week we launched one in Japanese (2 followers) as well.

Today I began the process of setting up 10 more for all the languages we regularly campaign in.  (I’ve begun work on the German feed.)

The Twitter feeds, which we will publicize, will be one more way to get the word out about our campaigns in those languages.

Nearly 3 months ago, I wrote here about LabourStart’s score on Klout, which measures our influence in social media. At the time, it was 56; this has fallen to 47. The average score is 20, so we remain relatively high. To increase our Klout score, we need more people to follow us on Twitter, to re-tweet our messages, and so on. I intend to follow up with this in the days and weeks to come and will keep you informed.

Headline news –
1 The Italian mailing list grew five-fold from 560 to 2,420, becoming our third largest list overnight – due to the FIAT campaign.
2 The Russian list also grew by some 15% in one month due to our Kazakhstan campaign.
3 For the first time ever, UnionBook has more members than our group on Facebook – which has declined in membership for the first time.
4 Our followers on Twitter outnumber both of these, and the number has now exceeded 5,000 for the first time.
5 Our relatively inactive group on LinkedIn continues to grow at the rate of 10% per month.
6 At the current rate of growth (5 new correspondents per month), we won’t reach 1,000 correspondents before the end of 2012 – so we’ll want to do a cull to remove inactive correspondents sooner than that.
7 Traffic to the site remained quite high considering that it was December. There were just under 600,000 unique visitors. And this in spite of the fact that the last third of the month would have seen many (or most) of our readers on vacation.

Here are the totals with the last month (December 2011) in brackets (large gains – 100+ – in bold face):

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

English: 66,576 [66,226]
French: 3,582 [3,333]
Italian: 2,420 [560]
Norwegian: 2,333 [2,337]
Spanish: 2,115 [2,082]
German: 1,516 [1,485]
Turkish: 778 [758]
Russian: 712 [617]
Polish: 304 [304]
Chinese: 276 [249]
Portuguese: 245 [245]
Dutch: 236 [235]
Finnish: 183 [182]
Swedish: 182 [182]
Japanese: 137 [133]
Danish: 107 [112]

And just below the radar:

Hebrew 96 [97]
Korean 93 [93]
Farsi 93 [93]
Arabic 89 [84]

Social networks

UnionBook 2.0 – members: 4,790 [4,706]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,714 [4,738]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 3,462 [3,192]
Like LabourStart page (French): 96 [89]

Twitter –
English – followers: 5,180 [4,964]
French – followers: 85 [82]

Union group on Flickr: 673 [661]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 551 [503]

Website

Correspondents: 940 [935]

Unique visits to the site this month : 597,481 [576,905]
Peak day: 23,597 – 17.12.11
Page views this month: 1,370,129 [1,371,687]

Here are the totals with the last month in brackets (large gains – 100+ – in bold face):

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

English: 66,226 [65,425]
French: 3,333 [3,291]
Norwegian: 2,337 [2,342]
Spanish: 2,082 [2,051]
German: 1,485 [1,058]
Turkish: 758 [708]
Russian: 617 [609]
Italian: 560 [552]
Polish: 304 [303]
Chinese: 249 [249]
Portuguese: 245 [244]
Dutch: 235 [235]
Swedish: 182 [188]
Finnish: 182 [181]
Japanese: 133 [124]
Danish: 112 [115]

And just below the radar:

Hebrew 97
Korean 93
Farsi 93
Arabic 84

Social networks

UnionBook 2.0 – members: 4,706 [4,599]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,738 [4,703]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 3,192 [2,855]
Like LabourStart page (French): 89 [83]

Twitter –
English – followers: 4,964 [4,699]
French – followers: 82 [80]

Union group on Flickr: 661 [658]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 503 [485]

Website

Correspondents: 935 [930]

Unique visits to the site this month : 576,905 [573,525]
Peak day: 25,482 – 2.11.11
Page views this month: 1,371,687 [1,402,386]

Some highlights:

* Nearly all the mailing lists are growing – some quite dramatically (the German and Spanish lists, for example, over the last couple of months).
* As for social networks, there’s now a virtual tie between the number of users of UnionBook, the members of LabourStart’s Facebook group, and our followers on Twitter. At the moment, the Facebook group is the largest – by 4 people. But it suffered a net loss in members this month, while UnionBook picked up about 100 new ones.  My guess is the UnionBook or Twitter will lead next month.
* We continue to pick up several members each week for our LinkedIn group, which we barely use and never promote. We’re now up to just under 500 members. If any of you are very active users of LinkedIn and are keen to take charge of this, let me know.
* At our current rate of growth, we’ll be at 1,000 LabourStart correspondents by the end of February. At that point – or sooner – we might want to begin to purge the list of inactive ones.
* There was a massive increase in traffic to the site in October – page views alone were up about 30% compared to September. And on a peak day, we’re now getting over 24,000 unique visitors.

Here are the totals with the last month in brackets (large gains are in bold face):

Mailing lists (with over 100 members)

English: 65,425 [65,139]
French: 3,291 [3,199]
Norwegian: 2,342 [2,318]
Spanish: 2,051 [2,021]
German: 1,058 [908]
Turkish: 708 [700]
Russian: 609 [597]
Italian: 552 [539]
Polish: 303 [302]
Portuguese: 244 [252]
Chinese: 249 [249]
Dutch: 235 [231]
Swedish: 188 [190]
Japanese: 124
Finnish: 181 [179]
Danish: 115 [117]

Social networks

UnionBook 2.0 – members: 4,599 [4,498]
Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,703 [4,714]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 2,855 [2,705]
Like LabourStart page (French): 83 [79]
Twitter –
English – followers: 4,699 [4,541]
French – followers: 80 [78]
Union group on Flickr: 658 [652]
LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 485 [464]

Website

Correspondents: 930 [916]
Unique visits to the site this month : 573,525 [503,250]
Peak day: 24,154 – 18.10.11
Page views this month: 1,402,386 [1,120,845]

Klout is a service that attempts to measure how much influence an organization or individual has based on a complex algorithm linked to their presence on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. It’s been getting a lot of publicity lately – here’s one example, from Wired.

Klout claims to measure the following:

• True Reach: How many people you influence
• Amplification: How much you influence them
• Network Impact: The influence of your network

Klout makes it relatively easy to look at unions, as they have a specific “labor” category.

Klout gives sites a rating from 0 – 100.  The average rating is around 20.  All the union websites we looked at rated higher.

Here are a random selection of a couple of dozen union sites from the USA. Canada, Australia, Ireland, Germany and global – note that LabourStart’s ranking is actually quite high.

1. AFL-CIO (USA) 70
2. SEIU (USA and Canada) 67
3. Working America (USA) 66
4. UNISON (UK) 62
5. PCS (UK) 61
6. UnionPlus (USA) 60
7. Unite (UK) 58
8. LabourStart 56 (click on the link to see more details)
9. CUPE (Canada) 55
10. ACTU Rights at Work (Australia) 51
11. UFCW (USA and Canada) 50
12. TUC Global (UK) 49
13. ITUC 49
14. IG Metall (Germany) 47
15. IWW (46)
16. CAW (Canada) 46
17. UNI Global Union 45
18. DGB (Germany) 44
19. Australian Workers Union (Austalia) 42
20. ETUC (Europe) 41
21. SIPTU (Ireland) 37
22. IFJ 29
23. IMF 27
24. IUF 21