Inside LabourStart

After 3 months, the UWUA and IndustriALL have agreed to close this campaign.

Unfortunately, the lockout continues.

We have three more campaigns in the pipeline, though I hope we won’t launch all three today …

February was not a good month for our statistics — across the board, we saw notable falls in traffic to our website.

The reason is simple: we launched just one campaign in February, and had fewer mailings than usual.  So while we still have tens of thousands of people who visit our website every day, the main source of traffic is always the campaigns.  New and popular campaigns are the only way to rapidly grow traffic to our site.

The previous month’s numbers are in brackets below. Notable growth is indicated in bold, green.

Mailing lists [with 200 or more subscribers]

English: 85,207 [85,250]
French: 7,603 [7,215]
Spanish: 5,136 [5,156]
Italian: 4,143 [4,146]
German: 4,062 [4,070]
Turkish: 3,253 [3,253]
Norwegian: 2,836 [2,902]
Russian: 2,518 [2,874]
Korean: 1,834 [1,861]
Dutch: 1,400 [1,401]
Chinese: 1,073 [1,074]
Finnish: 622 [630]
Japanese: 390 [391]
Arabic: 319 [321]
Portuguese: 269 [269]
Polish: 269 [280]
Indonesian: 254 [263]
Tagalog: 254 [254]
Hebrew: 246 [247]
Farsi: 242 [242]

Social networks

Twitter followers

English: 11,571 [11,409]
Canada English: 2,853 [2,751]
Canada French: 395 [378]
French: 201 [200]
USA: 187 [168]
Spanish: 67 [67]
German: 42 [38]
Japanese: 23 [23]
Russian: 16 [16]
Portuguese: 7 [7]

Facebook

Like LabourStart.org page (English): 8,475 [8,381]
Members of LabourStart group: 6,843 [6,715]
Like LabourStart page (French): 389 [380]
Like LabourStart page (German): 279 [235]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 131 [131]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 105 [104]

UnionBook
Members: 5,737 [5,707]

LinkedIn
LabourStart group: 1,562 [1,521]

Flickr
Union group on Flickr: 744 [743]

Website

Correspondents: 698 [691]

Website traffic

LabourStart.org (1&1 statistics)

Total visits: 552,898 [671,485]
Peak day: 23,305 [29,980]
Page impressions: 1,425,275 [1,568,434]

LabourStart.org (Clicky)

Total visitors: 32,524 [58,483]
Peak day: 3,212 [6,041]
Where they come from:
USA – 7,311 [13,091]
Canada – 5,317 [10,499]
UK – 3,408 [9,123]
Australia – 2,083 [4,081]
Norway – 1,791 [2,226]
Germany – 1,126 [1,690]
Indonesia – 849 [949]
India – 828 [–]
France – 721 [1,101]
Sweden – 683 [1,163]

LabourStartCampaigns.net (Clicky)

Total visitors: 15,361 [58,832]
Peak day: 3,636 [6,959]
Where they come from:
USA – 2,144 [9,441]
Canada – 1,933 [9,116]
UK – 1,755 [8,750]
Russia – 1,304 [4,739]
Belgium – 1,133 [1,730]
Australia – 882 [3,165]
South Korea – 709 [–]
France – 644 [2,004]
Germany – 554 [2,535]
Spain – 446 [1,933]

It’s not the first time we’ve been asked to do a campaign in support of our brothers and sisters in South Korea— but it’s the first time it’s tied into a “people’s strike” which is taking place there next Tuesday.

We’ll be getting a mass mailing out and texts for translation in the next few hours.

Let’s make this campaign massive!

Berlin conference:  We’ve made lots of progress on a wide range of issues, most of the work having been done by the organizing committee in Berlin.

We’re now up to 352 registered participants from 58 countries with the largest groups coming from Germany (77), the UK (49) and Nigeria (31).

Because of the very large number of people who’ve signed up to come from Africa, we’ve actually done a mailing to all of them and have recruited some new correspondents.  We’ve also been warned that some of these will not be representatives of genuine independent and democratic trade unions and are showing caution in who gets invitation letters (to get a visa into Germany).

Because of number of registrants we did consider moving the conference to a larger venue, but the majority of members of the organizing committee decided to stick with our current venue.

We’re still putting together the agenda, organizing solidarity housing for the 147 registrants who requested it, working on the visas, dealing with interpretation into the various languages, and much more.

Only 3 months to go!

Campaigns:

• It seems like we’re about to launch a new campaign in support of workers in Korea — details coming soon.
• We were going to close down the Sri Lanka campaign today, after three months, but IndustriALL has requested an extension.
• We received a lovely email from the union at the Labatt brewery where our campaign helped them win their very long strike — and we emailed our entire list about this win.
• We also received a message updating the Huber Ballesteros campaign (see below).
• We closed two campaigns — Mexico and a UK-only campaign but haven’t gotten updates back from either union.  It’s very important that unions which request campaigns from us report back to us on a regular basis and particularly when a campaign ends.

New language: We now have LabourStart in Hungarian — with some news already added by our only senior correspondent who speaks the language …

News interface: Now available in Italian for our Italian-speaking correspondents.

MailChimp: We’ve had our first mailings done by users other than me (which I need to approve) and these have been successful.  It’s great to share the load here.

Donations: I’ve now fixed the donations page so that if you’re donating in US dollars, the USA becomes your default country; if in Australian dollars, Australia is your default country, and so on.  This had been causing problems for some Americans trying to donate by credit card via PayPal.

We’ve just received the attached message from Justice for Colombia.  Our campaign in support of jailed trade union leader Huber Ballesteros has resulted in some improvements:

He was finally moved to a different wing of the prison, where the conditions are better than where he was previously being held, with less overcrowding and a cleaner environment. He now has his own cell, whereas before he was sharing with 3 other men, one of whom was a paramilitary which was very dangerous for him. The wing where he is now also has different rules for visitors, so family and friends are able to bring him food on Sundays. This is very important as Huber suffers from diabetes and has been denied the special diet he needs from the prison authorities, so it is essential that he can be provided with food for a good balanced meal at least once a week.  The authorities are considering his request to be able to write a book whilst he is in prison. [For the full text, click here – huber ]

Campaigns: I’ve fixed two things that were nagging me — (1) When signing up to support a campaign, you now must choose a country, and “Select a counrtry” doesn’t count.  Previously, we had “Afghanistan” as our first country and had large numbers of people ignoring this and letting that remain.  They’re now being forced to choose.  (2) You now have to enter a valid email address, with a “@” and full stops (periods).  Obviously we’re not completely testing, and some invalid email addresses will slip through., but at least you have to enter something that remotely looks like an email address.

News: See below — this should help expand the reach of our news stories.  (I’ve written to all our correspondents about this today.)

Mailing list: I’ve invited a number of senior correspondents and translators who already do mass mailngs to use MailChimp directly — and very pleased to see that several have taken me up on the offer.  This should speed things up a bit when sending out mailings.  We’ve nearly completed the migration of our language mailing lists from Sendy to MailChimp.

Berlin conference: Lots happening — details to come.

Interface for adding news: Our Finnish and (soon) Italian correspondents will have an interface in their languages when they post news.  This is already the case with a number of the languages.

Books: We’re making progress on the Dan Gallin book, which is already several hundred pages long.  Andy has translated the global labour book into French.  Tom is doing an inventory of books in the office and calculating how many we’ve sold in the first year as a publisher.

Dates of news stories: The dates appearing next to news stories now appear in the more standard dd-mm-yyyy format — an improvement suggested by Andy.

Campaigns:  There are a couple of suggested new ones.  Meanwhile, we closed the Fiji campaign — a big win.

Articles: I had two more articles appear on the KESK trial in Turkey — in Labor Notes and OpenDemocracy.net.

This says it all.

I spent much of the last two weeks travelling — to Istanbul, Geneva and Brussels — so this will have to be a relatively short report as I have much to catch up on.  Apologies if you’re waiting for an answer to an email — I’m struggling to catch up on that.

Campaigns: We launched new ones for Fiji (26 January) and Aeroflot (17 January). The latter, with just under 12,000 messages sent, is our largest current campaign.

Mailing lists: These continue to grow quite well.  The English list now stands at 85,419; the French list is up to 7,215.  The German list is poised to replace the Italian one as our fourth largest list, as it’s now up to 4,072, just 75 fewer than the Italian one.  That German list was around 2,500 a year ago, so it’s grown spectacularly. We’re migrating most of the lists back to MailChimp due to continuing software issues with Sendy.

Berlin 2014: We have 316 people signed up now (this includes some duplicates).  The organizing committee continues to meet and a lot of progress has been made, including on fundraising.  I continue with monthly mailings to all those who signed up — a mailing went out today.  We’ll be holding the meeting for UK participants on 20 February at the TUC.

Books: We have all the content for the next book (Dan Gallin) and I met with Dan in Geneva in order to discuss and to pick up some photos of him.  Andy has finished a translation of our second book (the global labour movement) into French.  Our fifth book, which we could publish in June, would be a collection of papers and speeches from our Berlin conference.

Turkey: I wrote a number of articles about the KESK trial I attended last week.  I’ll publicize these later today from my personal blog.

Campaigns:

• The Cambodia campaign is doing very well — after just a week, we’re up to well over 10,000 messages sent, making it our second largest current campaign (Kazakhstan is the largest).
• We just launched a campaign yesterday in defense of Colombian unions; it picked up some 4,300 supporters in the 24 hours online.
• We closed the previous Colombia campaign just in time after it ran for three full months.  Huber is, unfortunately, still in jail.

Berlin 2014:

• I participated on Saturday in a very good meeting with four members of our organizing committee in Berlin.  Gisela and I also agreed a number of changes to LabourStart’s German language page, some of which have been done.  These include some new pages about LabourStart, a registration form for new correspondents, and so on.
• The total number of people registered is now 280, up 20 in the last week.  Of those, 59 are from Germany and 42 from the UK (meaning that of those 20 new ones, 7 come from the UK and Germany).
• I wrote to the more than 100 people who’ve requested help getting a visa to clarify once again that we cannot help with airfares and to ask for some more details; about 19 have responded so far.
• The TUC is offering us a room to convene a meeting of people from the UK who have registered, or are thinking about coming to Berlin; we’ll hold this in February.
• We’re doing a lot of targetting of specific countries; Tom is doing some work focussing on the closest neighbours to Berlin: Poland, the Czech Republic and Denmark.
• I contacted the ITUC two days ago asking for a meeting when I’m in Brussels but no answer yet.
• I fixed the link to the conference on our home pages in all languages — it now points to the right place.

LabourStart Books:

• Dan Gallin has sent us 12 essays with 3 more to come; we’re exploring new ways to produce this as we’re not happy with CreateSpace’s service and will probably use Lulu (who did our calendar).  Our aim is the get the book out fairly quickly and certainly well in advance of the Berlin conference.

Correspondents:

• I continue with weekly mailings; this time, I aimed to encourage yet again inactive correspondents.  After 24 hours, we saw a result — a 10% increase in the number of correspondents posting news (up from 78 to 85 this month) and increase in stories (up by 326 in just one day — the previous daily average was just 167).
• We added several new correspondents this week.

French LabourStart:

• We continue to make progress, having made at least half a dozen fixes this week.  Some of them are small fixes to all languages and are contributing to making the site more useful for non-English speakers.

Canadian LabourStart:

• I moved some things around on the page at Derek’s request; it looks better now.

Country pages:

• I’ve fixed the search, which now always brings up the new pages.
• I’ve also created a search on all languages, which we had on the old site but hadn’t preserved.

Fundraising:

• It’s been a week since we launched our quarterly appeal to “power users” (people who’ve supported 3 or more campaigns in the last year).  Results have been good — we’ve taken in just over £4,000 in donations this week.  This is similar to how we did last April, and probably better than the two appeals since then.

Travel:

• I’ll be travelling for most of the next two weeks — all of next week in Istanbul as a guest of KESK, to participate in the opening of the trial of their activists.  The following week I’ll be in Geneva and then Brussels.  This may mean slower response times to emails, but I hope you’ll all understand.

We just closed the campaign demanding the release of Huber; today we launch a new one at the initiative of IndustriALL following the attack on the president of CUT and SINTRAELECOL-Caldas, Arturo Oscar Orozco.  Here’s the link to the new campaign: http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign.cgi?c=2141  Several other campaigns are in the pipeline at the moment from Russia, Fiji and Israel … it will be a very busy week for us.