Inside LabourStart

The British Trades Union Congress (TUC) has invited me to do a series of short talks to trade union reps around the country on the subject of online campaigning.  Naturally, the talk focusses on LabourStart and encourages the reps to get active with our ActNOW system.

Last Saturday I spoke in London to around 100 reps, yesterday in Leeds to around 30 and on Monday I’ll be in Manchester doing it again.  I begin with a show of hands — how many people have heard of LabourStart and seen the website.  In London, the vast majority were familiar with it. In Leeds, a minority.  I’m not sure why this is the case, but it demonstrates the importance of actually meeting people face to face and telling them about the site and the campaigns.

As I pointed out yesterday, there’s nothing like email to promote a campaign.

Using our newswires, Twitter, our website, etc., we managed to get about 11 messages sent in the first 24 hours this campaign was online.

In the last 24 hours, since our mass mailing went out (in English, and then later in the Scandinavian languages), we’ve gotten 1,821 messages sent.

So we can say that email is about 180 times as effective as any other tool we have to promote campaigns.

Let’s hope this helps persuade the Iraqi government to back off.

We launched a major new campaign yesterday. The soft launch (appearing on our home page, on the list of active campaigns on our site, via our ActNOW newswire, through our Tweets, status on UnionBook and Facebook, etc.) generated a grand total of 11 messages sent, including my own.  The difference between this and doing a mass mailing is enormous — so let’s not believe any of the hype about alternatives to email.  At the moment, there are no alternatives to email — this is the only effective way to build online campaigns.

Today I’ve sent the campaign, and a reminder to check our recent English language mailings on Posterous, to our volunteer translators, including our new Italian language translator.  I hope to have this campaign, like the previous one, translated into Russian as well.

Book sales have fallen — the sales of Economics for Everyone were a one-off.  Very few people bought either the Silkwood book or the cartoon book we promoted yesterday.  When we have a poor week, the income is really only pennies and we do have to wonder if it’s worth it for us to appear to be commercial when we’re not really making any money.  There is, of course, the educational value of promoting these books and the help we’re giving to UCS, to keep them going.

I’ll be speaking about LabourStart campaigns at a number of events in the next few weeks, including the South East Region of the Trades Union Congress in London this coming weekend, in Leeds and Manchester in the next few weeks (at TUC events), and at the International Metalworkers Federation communicators conference in Frankfurt next month.

As part of the effort to improve our capacity in other languages, I’ve been working with Andy Funnel to completely translate the interface for adding news in the French language for those correspondents who may not read English.  We’re nearly there — we’re working on the names of countries.  Once this is complete, we can do the same for other key languages, which will open the door to correspondents who do not read English.

I’ve been working on the Labour Newswire Global Network — the list of websites that use our newsfeeds — for the U.K.  I’m finding that a staggering number of sites have simply disappeared.  Unions that have merged into other unions — including some very large ones like the GPMU —  have simply given up on their domain names, which I find extraordinary.  Many local union websites have fallen into disuse, or evaporated into the ether.  In some cases, sites went through re-designs and in the process dropped our newswires.  Of the first 58 websites I’ve gone through, only 12 are active and using our newswires.  If this is true across all countries, then we don’t have 750 sites using our newswires — we are closer to having 150.  This means that we will need to seriously promote the newswires, especially the ActNOW one, to boost responses to our campaigns.

Meanwhile, the response to both our Photo of the Year competition and our Twitter survey have been great — much higher than anticipated.  2,833 votes cast so far in the competition with another 11 days to go (we’re already probably higher than we were last year) and the Twitter survey, with two more days to go, already has had 1,552 responses.  (More than two-thirds of the respondents do not use Twitter, by the way.)

Ainur Kurmanov

We’ve been asked by people from both the IMF and IUF to mobilize support for Ainur Kurmanov and I’ve now taken the first steps in what I hope will be a very large campaign.  These include:

1. Setting up the campaign in English – with text I received from Moscow
2. Sending out a test mailing – to make sure the messages don’t bounce
3. Informing the group in the IMF and IUF that the campaign is live and asking for a Russian version
4. Sending it out for translation into Norwegian, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish and Polish to our volunteer translators
5. Sending out an English language mass mailing to LabourStart’s list [51,040 subscribers]
6. Posting the message to Posterous, and thereby automatically sending it out via Twitter [1,586 followers]
7. Mailing to everyone in our Facebook group [2,025 members]
8. Adding a number of news links relating to the case
9. Asking the owner of the existing Facebook group in support of Ainur to write to all its members [687]

The joint ITUC-UNI-RENGO campaign for nuclear disarmament is an important initiative.  UNI has asked us to promote the online petition and we’ve done so in today’s mass mailing to our English list.  Originally we learned about this campaign back in May from the ITUC.

Everyone who signs the online petition from today will see a link at the end to sign up to LabourStart’s mailing list, so hopefully this will also help boost our own list in the process.

Eurostar campaign: We’ve heard from the RMT union that our campaign contributed to the pressure that has brought the company to the negotiating table.  There will be a meeting on Friday after which it is likely that we will suspend the campaign.  The campaign took off very quickly, with 3,176 messages sent in English, 60 in French, 68 in Norwegian, and 2 in Spanish, for a total of 3,306.

Labour Photo of the Year: I’m putting up a notice on the site that submissions will no longer be accepted.  We’re in the hands of the judges now.

Book sales: Sales of the children’s book “Fire in the Hole” were quite good this week.  Overall, in the third quarter of 2009 we sold just under $6,000 worth of books, with 128 orders placed.  This means a net income to LabourStart of $596.65 (£374.28).

My plan to attempt daily mailings in English, each one with its own distinct topic, isn’t working — at least not today.  A half dozen things hit us all at once, and as I will not be at my desk most of this week (I’ll be in Geneva), it was important to get all this stuff out at once, today.

A top priority was the IUF’s current Pakistan campaign — we were asked to help.  And at the same time, we got reports from two of our partner organizations in Israel about campaigns we’ve promoted to our readers (and it’s hugely important that we update them when we have such news).  This week also sees the opening of the trade union congresses in the USA and UK, which we could not pass up, especially as they’ve both picked up on so many cutting-edge web ideas which we too want to promote.  And we wanted to continue with offering a new book every week, and actually delayed the launch of the Union Strategies for Hard Times book which should have gone out last week.

I could have tried to create four or five separate mailings and staggered them throughout the week, and somehow delayed the sending each day, but felt it would be simpler and easier this one time to do it this way.  But let’s hope that this doesn’t continue and that we can return to the idea of one topic, one mailing, each day.

I’ve now posted our campaign guidelines here — so now, for the first time, we have made clear the rules and hope this will clear up any confusion.  Thanks to those of you who made comments on these.

It’s the end of summer (in the northern hemisphere), and Tuesday will be the first day back at work for many people.  (As well as the beginning of the school year for teachers and students.)  Expect a surge of LabourStart activity in the next few days including some online campaigns.  We’ve already been approached by no fewer than three Canadian unions to launch campaigns some of which may be Canadian only, others will be global.

This fits in neatly with our plan to experiment with daily, single-issue mass mailings (to our English list).  It also means that we cannot launch more than one campaign in a day, but nothing prevents us from launching three campaigns in three days.

We haven’t launched a new campaign since 26 July — six weeks ago, so we’re overdue …

As we discussed at our 2008 and 2009 conferences, LabourStart needs a set of simple guidelines (rules) that determine whether we accept a campaign or not.  What follows is my suggestion.  I welcome your response (use the comments) and intend to publish this in another two weeks (on 9 September) unless there’s a very strong objection raised.  Here goes [text updated 1.9.09]:

LabourStart runs online campaigns at the request of trade unions around the world.  Our preference is for campaigns to be submitted by global union federations, national trade union centres and national unions, but will in some circumstances accept campaigns from local and branch unions.  We do not normally accept campaigns submitted by individuals or NGOs which are not unions.  Campaigns which would benefit from global exposure and support are more likely to be approved than campaigns that will be of no interest outside of your locality or country.  Our campaigns run for three months and if the issues are not resolved by then, LabourStart reserves the right to suspend the campaign.  Unions which request campaigns from us are expected to keep us updated and to promote the campaign to their own members and others.  We never charge unions for running these campaigns and the service will always be free.