Inside LabourStart

I’ve added the option now add a link to a Facebook Cause tied in to any of our online campaigns. The first one is in support of the jailed Vietnamese trade unionists.  You can see the cause here and note its number – 542225.  We simply copy this number into the newly-created facebook_cause_id field when creating a campaign — the Facebook cause needs to be created before you have a number, of course.

If a cause exists, it automatically appears – with a small Facebook icon – on the campaign page.

I think this could be a way to raise awareness of our online campaigns as the ’cause’ software on Facebook is actually a fairly developed organizing tool, encouraging people to invite their friends to join causes.  There might well be a viral effect if the cause is interesting enough.  We’ll see.

Here are the totals with the changes since the end of last month in brackets:

Mailing lists – subscribers: 70,044 [+1,350]
LabourStart’s English language mailing list: 58,651 [+740]

Unique visits to the site this month: 558,404
Page views this month: 1,418,228

UnionBook 2.0 – members: 2,082 [+290]
Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 3,814 [+145]
Twitter – followers: 2,606 [+80]
Correspondents: 815 [+3]
Union group on Flickr: 583 [+9]
LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 202 [+1]

Some highlights from the mailing lists — the other large groups are:

Norwegian 2,725 [+9]
French 2,266 [+98]
Spanish 1,259 [+48]
German 803 [+2]
Italian 522 [+4]
Russian 478 [+33]
Turkish 475 [+22]
Polish 304 [-1]
Portuguese 237 [-1]
Chinese 236 [+53]
Dutch 232 [-1]
Swedish 229 [-1]
Danish 161 [-1]

The last month saw a very big gain for our mailing lists and much smaller growth for all the others.  Here are the totals with the changes since the end of February in brackets:

• Mailing lists – subscribers: 65,379 [+2,243]
• LabourStart’s English language mailing list – 54,236 [+1,582]
• UnionBook – members: 4,435 [+25]
• Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 2,863 [+54]
• Twitter – followers: 2,079 [+57]
• Correspondents: 756 [+9]
• Union group on Flickr: 533 [+5]
• LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 158 [+7]

Some highlights from the mailing lists — the other large groups are:

• Norwegian 2,589
• French 1,772
• Spanish 1,020
• German 738
• Italian 452
• Russian 293
• Polish 289
• Swedish 221
• Portuguese 216
• Dutch 186
• Danish 149

Here are today’s totals with the change since the end of December in brackets.  The total for mailing lists now includes all users of laborlists.org — and this now includes a small number who are not subscribers to LabourStart’s own lists.  There is no longer any redundancy — someone who is on both the English list and another list is no longer counted twice.  So the figure of 62,225 is much closer to an accurate number than we’ve had for some time now.  To make it easier to track progress on our largest list, I’m now including the total for the English LabourStart list as well.

• Mailing lists – subscribers: 62,225 [+1,690]
• LabourStart’s English language mailing list – 52,548
• UnionBook – members: 4,366 [+38]
• Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 2,764 [+160]
• Twitter – followers: 1,987 [+47]
• Correspondents: 732 [+10]
• Union group on Flickr: 527 [+1]
• LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 137 [+58]

Here are today’s totals with the change since the end of November in brackets.

UnionBook has not actually lost members; what’s happened is that I’ve deleted hundreds of banned members.  The current number is almost entirely real trade unionists using the site.  Our mailing lists have hardly grown at all, due both to the holiday season and the lack of new, inspiring campaigns.  The Facebook group continues to grow fairly dramatically, as does the number of followers on Twitter.  Our new LinkedIn group has quintupled in size over the last month, though I can’t say we’ve yet found a real use for it.

• Mailing lists – subscribers: 60,535 [+217]
• UnionBook – members: 4,328 [-608]
• Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 2,604 [+90]
• Twitter – followers: 1,940 [+70]
• Correspondents: 722 [+8]
• Union group on Flickr: 526 [+4]
• LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 79 [+65]