Inside LabourStart

It’s Monday morning and for the fourth week running, we’re launching a new campaign.  This time, we’re helping the TUC-backed Justice for Colombia to campaign for the release of trade union leader Huber Ballesteros.

Campaigns: We launched two new campaigns – in support of striking workers at Crown Holdings in Toronto, and in support of the Korean teachers’ and public service unions, threatened with deregistration by their government.  The former is up to over 7,300 messages sent, and the latter, after just a couple of days, is already up to just under 6,800.  Following the release of jailed Canadian trade unionist John Greyson in Egypt, we were able to close down the campaign.  We also used one of our mass mailings to promote the IUF’s campaign in support of jailed independent trade unionists in China.  The UN workers campaign, with nearly 14,000 messages sent, is our largest current campaign, and one of the largest we’ve ever done.

Calendar and Book Sales:  In its first month, our LabourStart wall calendar for 2014 has sold 144 copies, an average of about five per day.  I did another push this week which generated only two new sales in two days.  Book sales totalled 1,664 as of earlier this week — with 959 of those being the campaigning book in English.

Book 3: Jeremy Green and I have completed a first draft of our book on Firefox OS for Activists.  We’re making some final tweaks today and tomorrow and hope to have it ready on Monday.

Public events: I spoke at the European Trade Union Institute seminar in Brussels on lobbying the institutions of the EU last week; the ETUI purchased 30 copies of our campaigning book.  Last Saturday, I spoke to nearly 100 activists from UNISON Wales in Cardiff, and sold all 10 campaigning books I brought with me.

Berlin 2014: While in Brussels, I had a chance to meet up with ITUC staff to discuss coordinating our efforts.  In Berlin, meanwhile, we’ve set up a meeting at the Friedrich Ebert foundation for the day I arrive, later this month.

Fundraising: I did the quarterly appeal to our power users, and the mailing this time reached 20,164.  Ten days into the previous appeal, in July, we’d raised only £1,843.72.  This time, we’ve raised £3,191.93 in the same period — a gain of 73%.

Intern: We received about 40 applications for our internship; we’re completing the shortlist today and tomorrow and will do interviews within two weeks.

See here.

We win another one.  This campaign, which generated 8,314 messages to the Egyptian government, contributed to this wonderful news.

Following up on popular requests (well, Derek), I’ve added some website stats this month.

These should be taken with a grain of salt — actually, a bucket-load of salt.

We are increasingly using Clicky to measure our web traffic and that’s the only system we use on the campaign pages.

The Clicky code has not been placed on every single page on LabourStart.org (the news site), but it should also give a good indication of the number of actual visitors to the live section of the website.

So, why is 1&1 giving a much larger number?

Hard to tell — some of that is, strangely enough, “internal traffic” from 1&1’s own servers, a lot of it will be robots and spammers.

Over time, we’ll put the Clicky code on even more pages on our site to try to make sure that we’re not missing anything, but we’re certainly not missing traffic to our home pages in the various languages.  (Except French, which only moved over to the new system in mid-month, and is therefore missing Clicky stats for the first part of the month.)

Starting next month, we’ll be able to compare, to note any increases if they happen.

Already, interesting to note fairly high traffic from countries which don’t play a big role in our campaigns, but seem to come visit our news pages — Indonesia and India in particular.  I can’t really explain the surge in interest from South Korea to our campaigns pages — it didn’t translate into people signing up to campaigns in Korean, though perhaps they were directed to a different language by a link somewhere.  (75 people from South Korea did sign the English language message to Ban Ki-moon.)

The most important day, all three sets of statistics agree on this, was Monday, 23 September — the day we launched our campaign targetting UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.  Somewhere between 12,000 and 34,000 trade unionists visited LabourStart on that day.

New! Website traffic

LabourStart.org (1&1 statistics)

Total visits: 623,875
Peak day: 34,420 on 23.9
Page impressions: 1,845,122

LabourStart.org (Clicky)

Total visitors: 51,799
Peak day: 7,798 on 23.9
Where they come from:
USA – 9,789
Canada – 9,138
UK – 8,469
Indonesia – 4,665
Australia – 3,048
Norway – 1,733
New Zealand – 1,226
India – 1,021
Sweden – 935
Germany – 867

LabourStartCampaigns.net (Clicky)

Total visitors: 42,534
Peak day: 11,817 on 23.9
Where they come from:
Canada – 9,197
UK – 7,119
USA – 6,482
Australia – 2,561
Spain – 1,456
New Zealand – 1,363
Germany – 1,115
South Korea – 1,102
France – 1,091
Belgium – 1,074

Mailing lists

New! Total for all lists: 116,485

[This was 103,324 8 months ago – a net gain of 13,161 new subscribers, or 1,645 per month]

English: 83,741 [81,907]
French: 6,717 [6,443]
Spanish: 4,994 [4,905]
Italian: 4,004 [4,017]
German: 3,323 [3,312]
Turkish: 3,281 [3,283]
Norwegian: 2,472 [2,433]
Russian: 2,093 [2,051]
Dutch: 1,376 [1,377]
Chinese: 1,010 [1,011]
Finnish: 577 [577]
Japanese: 334 [334]
Arabic: 315 [313]
Polish: 282 [282]
Tagalog: 254 [254]
Portuguese: 247 [248]
Hebrew: 225 [215]
Farsi: 213 [207]
Swedish: 193 [195]
Indonesian: 163 [153]
Korean 154 [154]
Danish: 137 [137]
Czech: 88 [88]
Thai: 68 [68]
Esperanto: 61 [55]
Greek: 60 [60]
Hindi: 40 [40]
Slovak: 19 [19]
Bulgarian: 19 [19]
Creole: 13 [13]
Vietnamese: 12 [12]

Social networks

Twitter followers –

English: 10,266 [10,033]
Canada English: 2,289 [2167]
Canada French: 234 [219]
French: 187
Spanish: 59
USA: 31 New!
Japanese: 23
German: 15
Russian: 15
Portuguese: 7

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English):7,925 [7,832]
Members of LabourStart group: 5,936 [5,689]
Like LabourStart page (French): 340 [329]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 127 [126]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 99 [97]

UnionBook –
Members: 5,627 [5,610]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,403 [1,383]

Union group on Flickr: 734 [732]

Website

Correspondents: 663 [670]

This one comes at the request of the United Steelworkers.

LabourStart is currently running five global campaigns launched over the last two months — but the one launched yesterday is already our largest.

Interestingly, the majority of people who open the mass mailing about this campaign then click through to view the campaign.

Here are the numbers for the mass mailings done so far today, showing the number of those who clicked-through compared to those who opened and read our message:

• Hebrew – 14 out of 18 – 78%
• Spanish – 239 out of 310  – 77%
• Indonesian – 2 out of 3 – 67%
• Russian – 69 out of 121 – 57%
• Indonesian – 5 out of 9 – 56%
• Farsi – 6 out of 13 – 46%

For yesterday’s mailings to our largest lists, it’s not a majority, but very large numbers nonetheless:

• English – 6,529 out of 14,440 – 45%
• French – 610 out of 1,304 – 47%

As I’ll be away for much of the time for the next week, I thought I’d do a slightly early update of the last week.  Some highlights …

Campaigns

• We launched two new LabourStart global campaigns in the last three days — in defense of Honduran trade union leader Victor Crespo, and in support of unions representing staff at the United Nations.  The first of these had almost 6,300 supporters after 3 days; the second had over 4,000 in just 6 hours.
• We closed down two of our campaigns — the UK-only campaign in support of cleaners at the University of London, and the formerly-Canadian-only, later global campaign in support of workers at the Labatt brewery.
• We gave an extra boost to our John Greyson campaign after hearing about his hunger strike.
• In addition, we did a mailing to promote two major new IUF campaigns focussing on Colombia and Honduras.
• Last week I was invited to UNISON to discuss with them how they could use their new app for smartphones to push LabourStart campaigns out to their members.

News & Correspondents

• Search is now working on our home page in all languages once again.
• I did a second weekly mailing to all our correspondents.
• We now have a translation of our interface into Icelandic, but no volunteer correspondents have stepped forward there yet.
• We did, however, pick up new volunteer correspondents in Denmark and Finland.

This could be a very big one.

Please make sure to sign up and spread the word widely.

Today after 4 months online we’ve closed a UK- only campaign in support of Tres Cosas, representing cleaners at the University of London.  Just under 1,500 people supported the campaign.