Inside LabourStart

We had this problem before and forgot about it – our server cannot take a sudden load.  We’re going to take steps to begin moving parts of LabourStart over to the server we use to host UnionBook – starting with the campaigns.

The Iran campaign launched yesterday was a good example.  In the first hour online, some 400 people succeeded to send off messages – but a certain number hit ‘500’ error messages.  Over the course of about 20 hours, we got a total of 3,774 messages sent – which is very high for us.

The campaign is live in four languages – Dutch, French, German and English.  We’ve received the translation into Spanish and that will go live today.  We’re still waiting for translations into other languages, including Farsi.

We now once again have a JavaScript and RSS feed for LabourStart.tv — these are highlighted on the LabourStart.tv page.  I’ve also added the story’s source to the list.

I’ve finally gotten around to testing the Vietnamese language interface for our ActNOW campaigns – it seems to work.

We may be very near the end of the DESA campaign in Turkey — we generated over 5,000 messages.  It seems like the union has won a big victory – more tomorrow.

I’ve fixed our old subscribe-me page — it was still directing some people (hopefully, not many) to our old iContact mailing list.

In the new year, we’ll be selling copies of the TUC-produced book, Hadi Never Died.  This is an opportunity to show our support for our Iraqi comrades and to raise a small amount of money for LabourStart.  I’ve done up the first page promoting this on UnionBook.  In January – on the 4th anniverary of Hadi Saleh’s murder – we’ll promote this to our entire list.

LabourStart’s Wal-Mart page and our newswire have now been fixed and work well with the new database.

We’ve had some problems posting French-language news stories from the ICEM – and the issue may have been solved by changing the URL field in our news links database to Unicode.  Fingers crossed.  Thanks to both Andy and Tom for pointing this out.

The daily counter for our campaigns is now fixed – thanks to Derek for spotting that it wasn’t working.

We’ve done some work on fixing the character encoding for our ActNOW newswire in Norwegian – the problem for the moment is deciding which character encoding most Norwegian union websites use.  Thanks to Espen for spotting the problem.

There was a problem if you clicked on a state/province name on our front page that included a space — e.g., New York.  This has now been fixed.

The form which allows readers to submit a news story didn’t have enough space for long URLs – this has now been fixed.

In a seminar I recently attended on the subject of online campaigning, I heard a bit about the notion of power users, of a core group of supporters who can be relied upon to participate in many more campaigns than the average.

Some time ago I prepared a script that would show us who these people were, and have now updated it.

Basically, we have 205 individuals who participate in every single campaign we launch without exception.  We need to find ways to make the best use of this information and to cultivate this group.  Any ideas?

As the Teamsters have stopped focussing on The Gap as part of their Oak Harbor campaign — they’ve moved on to other companies — we’ve agreed to shut down our campaign after about 6 weeks online.  We’ll announce this in today’s mass mailing.

We’ve also asked the UE — which has been quite busy this week — about closing down the Janos, Mexico campaign which was launched in August.  We’ve had no updates at all from them, and fewer than 1,000 messages sent.

We’ve re-launched the Farzad campaign, as requested by the Education International.  Once again this includes a mailing to our list, a separate one to our correspondents, to our Facebook group, our Twitter followers, etc.   We run the risk of 1&1 once again closing us down. As we have very little time here, here are the two steps I’ve taken:

• I’ve asked Nick Holden how quickly we could get an alternative site up and running if we crash again
• I’ve written to the team at 1&1 which did finally sort out our problem to advise them that we were doing this and to make sure that they don’t close us down

Basically, plan B is this: if we crash again, we set up quickly somewhere else and email everyone with the new URL.  I don’t see another way.

Meanwhile, fingers crossed.

At the request of Education International, we’ve launched an urgent action appeal to save the life of jailed Iranian Kurdish trade union leader Farzad Kamangar, who may be hanged sometime in the next few hours.  The urgent action is here.

Publicity so far includes:

• Mailing to all our correspondents – 519 email addresses
• Mailing to our English list – 53,145 addresses
• Mailing to all members of the LabourStart Facebook group – 1,788 members
• Tweet to all our 593 followers on Twitter

In the first hour online, the campaign had 106 messages sent.

After more than 3 months, we’ve suspended the Iran campaign.  The total number of messages sent was a very respectable 6,431.

This may be unprecedented – barely 24 hours after going live, we’ve had a total of 3,512 messages sent — 3,254 of them in English, 28 in Spanish, 37 in Italian, 111 in French and 82 in Norwegian.  The largest groups of supporters come from:

• USA 754
• UK 668
• Canada 616
• Australia 562
• Ireland 127

By way of contrast, we only have 2,788 messages sent out in support of the Oak Harbor (USA) campaign, which has been running for 24 days.  The Mexico campaign, running for nearly 3 months, still has fewer than 1,000 messages sent.  Our biggest active campaign is the Iran one, with 6,390 supporters.   It will be suspended next week after running for more than three months.

The campaign is here and is already live in five languages; after only a few hours, and on a Sunday, we have 908 messages sent.  The mailing has already gone out in English, French, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish.

We’ve been asked by Labour Behind the Label (part of the Clean Clothes Campaign) to prepare to do a campaign on Turkey.  In a rare case of actual planning before the event, we should have the text ready very shortly, can send it to translators, but won’t go live until 16 November.  Details to follow.