Inside LabourStart

We now have the beginnings of campaigns-specific Frequently Asked Questions page (here) and this in addition to newly-designed pages to show current campaigns and our privacy policy.  When the FAQ is completed – and I’d really appreciate your comments and ideas – we’ll change the design of the main “show campaign” page to reflect the new colours and style.  And then I’ll ask translators to help make the whole spanking-new system work well in all languages.

Take a moment to look at our list of current campaigns in English.  Find one you haven’t yet sent a message to.  Send off your message. Note the final screen — a huge improvement on what we had, I think.  Still to do: versions in other languages, sending out an email message with similar links to those who send off messages, and using this lovely template for more of the pages including proper About and FAQ pages.  I am to have all that completed before we launch our next big campaign.

I continue doing the migration of most of our short and inactive lists to MailChimp – but am holding off on the biggest (Norwegian, French) until I have the consent of the editors.  Each day I migrate 5 or 6 languages over.

I’ve raised the question with the ITUC and some of the GUFs that we need a popular campaign – one that will get tens of thousands of supporters – in order to grow our list in the way that groups like 38degrees and Avaaz do.  Our campaigns tend to focus on little-known industrial disputes and often the first time anywhere has ever heard of these is when we campaign on them.  From time to time, we should take on more popular causes — and the growth of our mailing lists will mean that the smaller campaigns will benefit enormously.

I’ve posted a page where I intend to document all the campaigns we’ve done over the years — to see who has been asking us (recently, mostly GUFs), which countries are affected, how many people sign up, who the target was, and what the result on the ground was.  I’d personally find this useful when I give talks or write articles about online campaigning, but it will also more generally give us a sense of what we’ve been doing and where we should be going.

I’m in negotiations with an exiled Iraqi trade unionist in the USA — USLAW was circulating an appeal to people to help him out.  I think we’ll pay him something to translate some of our stuff (e.g., campaigns, mailings) into Arabic.

I’ve taken a number of important steps to make our site more secure, which I won’t be publishing here for obvious reasons.  Suffice it to say that the Berkman Center report on how human rights organizations are vulnerable to cyber-attack has influenced me and I had a fairly long to-do list of things which have all now been implemented.  I’m happy to discuss this with any of you by email.

When a person sends off a protest/solidarity message using our ActNOW system, they arrive at a page thanking them – and suggesting some more things that they can do.  This page has been built and rebuilt over the years and has become a mess.  The things we really want to highlight are buried, unimportant stuff is prominent, and so on.  And it looks like crap.

I spent quite a bit of time yesterday doing an attractive redesign which I hope to have finished today or tomorrow.

And in addition to an improved landing page, there’ll also be – once again – an email message sent immediately to campaign supporters acknowledging what they’ve done, thanking them, and suggesting next steps.  We used to do this, but stopped.

I learned about PledgeBank at the recent NetRoots conference hosted by the British TUC in London.  Does anything think it would be a good idea to use this to promote LabourStart – and not only to fund us?  Looking forward to reading your comments.  (Please spend a few moments on PledgeBank first to get an idea of how it works.)

Back at my desk after being away for more than a week … here are some updates:

• There’s now a shortcut to our news about Wisconsin – just go to www.labourstart.org/wisconsin .  I’ve also fixed the page the displays state/provincial news; it had been showing a link to our old mailing lists.
• I’ve written to the CTUWS to ask if they want us to do a campaign opposing the Egyptian government’s plan to ban strikes.
• I spoke last week at the New Orleans conference of the UALE – on a panel on the subject of global solidarity.  My lecture notes are here.  The conference was an opportunity to do some networking and I learned a lot about Wisconsin and other issues that concern the labour movement in the US.
• We’re up to 55 people attending (or possibly attending) our conference in November.
• MailChimp suspended our account last week because one person on one of our lists claimed he never signed up.  I proved to them today that he had, so I hope that later today we will be able to resume mailings.

The first mass mailing we ever did with Mail Chimp went out 4 hours ago and one result is that we have just under 1,000 messages sent to the Chilean government — coming in at the rate of about 240 per hour.  This is considerably faster than what we were able to achieve in the past.  But it was expected.

A few years ago I wrote about the ‘velocity’ of campaigns and noted that when I demonstrated this in Canada, it took us 40 hours to get from 1 message to 1,000 sent.  Today it takes one-tenth that amount of time – only four hours.

But also interesting to note another number that is persistent over the last four hours.  About 20% of those who open their email — even if only to glance at it — then go on to support the LabourStart campaign we’re promoting.  That’s an extraordinarily high number.  At the moment, we’re talking about 970 people out of 4,550.  Imagine if all 60,000 people were to open their email message — it would mean 12,000 messages sent to the Chilean government, our largest campaign by far.

This is the first campaign we’re promoting using MailChimp and we’ll see if the vastly increased speed of delivery as well as improved graphics capability leads to better results.  In the first 20 minutes, all the messages were delivered to our list, 915 people opened and read them, 168 of whom supported the campaign (an astonishing 18% response rate!).  In addition to this campaign, we’re promoting BananaLink’s campaign in support of women plantation workers, telling people to save the date for our conference, and promoting our book of the month.

We’ve just closed down the campaign in support of jailed teacher trade unionist Rosalba Gaviria Toro, which generated 3,590 messages of protest.  Natasha Morgan of Justice for Colombia wrote to say: “Labour Start has really boosted the campaign, and it would be excellent to work with you again in the future.”

We’ve found a better way than Twitfeed to automatically update LabourStart’s tweets.  We now use Tweetlive for this purpose.  At present we have 3,027 followers, a gain of 25% in the last six months with some 600 new followers.

We now have a newswire for British Columbia; this was requested by someone who designs and manages websites for unions there.

All the email addresses we collected in our first annual survey of global trade union use of the net have now been added to our mailing lists.

Here are our top current campaigns – all of them launched within the last month – in order of popularity:

• 4,617 Bangladesh: Free Moshrefa Mishu (20 Jan)
• 3,346  Mexico: Defend trade union rights (10 Feb)
• 2,554 Turkey: Reform labour laws now (26 Jan)
• 2,385 Philippines: Dole must respect union rights (16 Feb)
• 2,332 Pakistan: Reinstate sacked trade union leader at Syngenta (9 Feb)
• 1,683 Turkey: Polyplex must reinstate sacked workers, negotiate with union (9 Feb)

Over 5,000 messages were sent out in response to our campaign appeals in the last 48 hours – this is a new record for us.

Many of these were new people and as a result, our mailing lists saw significant growth this week.

The net gain to all our lists in the last 17 days was over 1,650 subscribers – with major gains for English (1,275 new subscribers), Spanish (165 new subscribers), and Turkish (150 new subscribers).