Inside LabourStart

Annual survey: We’ve gone up from 500 responses to 2,082. We still need 872 more to beat last year’s record. We got an article on the TUC blog, Stronger Unions, which has helped boost interest in the UK.  We’ll stop collecting responses in just 13 more days — on 19 March.

Site re-design: I incorporated most of the comments made by comrades on what I did so far. Masha, who is a professional graphic designer, is going to suggest a new logo design soon — once we have that, we can go live, first with the English version. The draft site is here.

Campaigns: We launched our Turkey campaign and it’s already up to 8,613 supporters. We closed down the Bahrain and Netherlands FNV campaigns (see separate posts for reports.) Edd and I both did articles about the Turkey campaign for Solidarity and the New Left Project (a website).

Book 1 (Online campaigning): The French edition has been created and is available for purchase. Sales of both editions have now reached 611, with another 43 free copies given out, for a total of 654. We’ve now paid for ‘extended distribution’ meaning that the books (in English and French) will be available in bookshops and from other online retailers, including Amazon Canada.

Book 2 (Global labour movement): Edd and I are working hard on this one, aiming to get it ready by May Day. In addition to what we’re writing, we solicited submissions from a number of comrades and are pleased that we’ll have contributions from ICTUR, Amnesty, the Global Labour Institutes, the TUC and others. See more details here: http://www.labourstart.org/blogs/?p=2818

Internationalization: We’ll have campaigns in Slovak starting this week. All our campaigns have been translated into Esperanto and our translation group in that language now has 8 members. I’ve contributed an article (an interview, of sorts) for an Austrian Esperanto magazine about LabourStart. We’ll have a Korean interface for our news later today.

Fundraising: We now have a venue and date for our London May Day fundraiser – May 4th, 19:30 at the Bread and Roses pub.  Two months before the event, 77 people say they are coming or may be coming.

Public speeches: I spoke at the Unison Wales Women’s Development Weekend in Swansea on Saturday to an audience of about 26; I sold all 10 of the online campaigning books I brought with me. Next Wednesday, Edd and I (and Anita Gardner of IndustriALL) will be on a panel at the e-Campaigning Forum in Oxford. On March 31st, I’ve been invited to speak at a fringe meeting of the annual conference in Bournemouth of the teachers union NASUWT. In addition, Napo – the probation officers union – has asked me to run a workshop on social media.

Social Networks: We now have a page on Google+ which, according to our survey, is widely used by trade unionists.

App for smartphones and tablets: I’m completing one this week for the IUF and when done, I’ll know how to do the one for LabourStart.

Annual survey: We’ve gotten just over 500 responses so far in the first week; last year we got 2,954. We have yet to do a dedicated mailing on this subject and when that goes out, we should see a big response. So far, we mentioned this in another mailing a week ago, but not as the top or exclusive story. Today, we mailed to over 5,400 UnionBook members about this.

Site re-design: I’ve now shared this with a number of people and will soon be posting my comments on their comments.

Campaigns: The Cameroon campaign was closed down after 3 months. We may launch a Turkey campaign later today.

Online campaigning book – French edition: This has been created and will shortly be ready for sale.

Internationalization: I completed a review of our 50 languages – see post below for details.

Fundraising: UNI has made a substantial pledge, as has PSI. We have made progress in getting a venue and performers for the first-ever LabourStart fundraiser, to be held in London on 4 May (tentative date).

Annual survey of trade union use of the net: This went live in English and French editions about 24 hours ago.  So far, there have been 271 responses.  Last year we got 2,954 over the course of a month, and the year before that, 1,336.

Site re-design: Work has resumed on this and significant progress made.  We’ll have a more attractive site to show in a few days.  For those of you desperate to see the work-in-progress, email me and I’ll tell you where to look.

Campaigns:

• New campaigns: We’re launching two new campaigns this week specifically for Canada (on behalf of COPE) and the UK (on behalf of RMT).
• Viewing campaign supporters: Some time ago we made it so that you needed a password to view the list of campaign supporters.  The problem was, you needed to embed that password in the URL.  This is now user-friendly; you can key in the password directly onto the page, in a form.
• Campaigns landing page: This now works in French – modeled on the English version.  We’ll eventually have this working for all languages.
• New languages for campaigns and mailing lists: We now have a significant mailing list for Tagalog (191 addresses).  Our Czech friends have completed translations so we now have a couple of campaigns and have done a mailing in Czech (95 subscribers).  We  have three volunteers signed up to help coordinate translations of our campaigns into Esperanto; they’ve formed a Google Group to share the effort.

Books:

• Book 1: The Kindle edition of our book (Campaigning Online and Winning)  is now live and has been promoted.  Sales of the paperback edition are now well above 500.  We’re waiting for the French and German translations.  We’ve essentially run out of the 100 copies we bought for the office, and have ordered – and received – 100 more. A review is appearing in the next edition of Labor Notes, in the USA.
• Book 2: Edd and I are in the advanced stages of planning for this one — more details very soon.
• Book 3: I completed and submitted my manuscript to UCS 12 days ago — waiting to hear from them what else they need, and a schedule.  The working title is Making Unions Stronger – Using the Internet Better, but this will change.

News database:

• Countries list for news database: There were several versions of this — you could, for example, add a story for a new country such as “South Sudan”, and that country was one of the options, but that name didn’t appear in the list of countries on the front page of LabourStart.  This has now been fixed — both scripts are now reading from the same file.
• Languages for posting news: While it was possible to post to LabourStart in some 50 languages, we have only about 30 translated front pages — so if you posted a news story in, say, Urdu, it entered the database and would have appeared if you searched for news in all languages — but was not tagged in our database with any specific language.  This has now been fixed, and every story in the database from now on is tagged with a language code.
• Newswires for all 50 US states: We now have this — previously we had for fewer than a dozen.  Now we have to think about how to publicize this – it could be useful for local unions, state federations, and so on.

Fundraising:

• Fundraising: I wrote to every global union federation last week; only two have responded, one with a promise to donate more than last year.
• Fundraising evening in London: We’re making plans to hold this on 27 April – details coming soon.

Another very busy week:

Campaigns:

New campaign launched in support of PKC workers in Mexico, together with IndustriALL. Two days after launch, the campaign had over 6,300 supporters — including nearly 140 for the Finnish edition. As a result, and including some earlier efforts, we now have probably over 500 Finnish email addresses.

The UK-only RMT campaign has grown from 2,600 a week ago to over 3,200 today — by far our biggest ever campaign that was only publicized in a single country, and proof of what can happen when we team up with a local union that knows how to mobilize its members.

The Korea campaign continues to grow, but not as quickly as we’d like. It’s now up to 10,250 — and needs more than 1,000 more supporters if it were to be our largest current campaign. We wrote to every PSI affiliate last week about this campaign.

Our comrades in the Philippines have now made an effort to boost support for their month-old campaign, and the result is 22 supporters in Tagalog — our first campaign ever in that language. They’ve sent us the text for a Spanish version as well, which should go live very soon.

Upcoming campaigns: We’re still waiting on a final text from Australia on a campaign to support Bob Carnegie.

Czech campaigns: Four out of six people on our list responded favorably to my request for assistance, so expect to soon see campaigns in Czech, and an active email list (we already have 65 addresses).

Esperanto campaigns: I’ve written to our small list to see if there’s any interest in doing campaigns (and reviving our news page) in this language.

Book sales: Last week I reported that we’d sold just under 500 copies in 5 weeks; today I can report that we sold a total of 543. Book sales following a campaign launch remain high – we sold 4 copies yesterday and 10 copies the day before that.  I’ve had to order another 100 copies from the publisher, as I expect to sell some at upcoming trade union events we’ve been invited to in Oxford, Bournemouth and Swansea.

UCS book: In the hands of the publisher; we should have some news on this within a few days.

Articles: I had my first articles on the British TUC’s Stronger Unions blog and the ITUC’s Equal Times website.

Fundraising: February has, so far, been a good month. We’ve taken in £4,549 so far (not all of that donations to LabourStart — some is paid work that I did). If that continues (unlikely, but we can hope), it may be our best month ever.

London fundraiser: We’ve begun serious discussion with friendly entertainers about doing a London fundraising event. More details soon.

Campaigns:

• Korea campaign: Still growing, but not yet at 10,000.  We’ll be writing to every PSI affiliate in the next few days to get them on board.
• Mexico campaign: We’ll be doing our bit as part of the IndustriALL-sponsored Week of Action; our campaign should be launched on Monday the 11th in support of Los Mineros; we have the full backing of the United Steelworkers in the USA and Canada on this one.
• UK campaign: We launched our biggest-ever UK-only campaign, in cooperation with the RMT.  They emailed and texted all their members about it, producing a sudden sharp increase in the number of supporters.  This is now up to almost 2,600 supporters.  UK campaigns will now show on the UK news page.
• Australia campaign: Expect a campaign in the next day or two in support of Bob Carnegie.

Languages:

• Tagalog: We’ve had our first two campaigns translated into this Filipino language; we’ll now begin creating newswires and publicizing this.
• Polish: We have now had a couple of campaigns translated and a mailing done to our list.  Six of the 20 Polish people who signed up to our most recent English campaign volunteered to translate campaigns in future — so it looks like we’re reviving our project.
• Czech: Following up on the Polish model, I contacted the small number of Czechs who had signed up for the most recent campaign in English; several of them have volunteered to help get campaigns up in their language.  We have a mailing list of 65 Czech trade unionists, so this can probably grow fairly easily into 100 or more.
• Chinese: We’ve now added the campaigns to the home page in Chinese and Lennon has suggested a number of changes to improve the page.  The number of Chinese supporters for our most recent campaign has grown considerably thanks to Lennon’s efforts.
• Korean: Our first campaign to get more than a handful of Korean responses has meant that we finally have a small, but growing, Korean mailing list.
• Vietnamese: It’s been a while since we’ve had a campaign appear in Vietnamese, but we’ve gotten the latest one translated and hope to begin growing a base of supporters in this language.
• Japanese: Mac has resumed translations — and publicity — so the Korea campaign is available in this language and has had some significant support in Japan.
• Indonesian: We’ve now added the campaigns to the home page in this language too.  All our campaigns are now showing on their appropriate home pages — if we have campaigns in that language.  Otherwise, the English campaigns are usually shown.
• Portuguese: We were able to get the latest campaign up and mailing out thanks to the PSI staffer in South Africa who has volunteered to help with this very important global language.
• Finnish: We’ll have our first Finnish language campaign next week – the Mexico campaign, which targets a Finnish employer.

Annual survey on trade union use of the net: We’re going to launch this one soon, have collected some very good suggestions from senior correspondents and others.

Mailing lists: We continue the transition from MailChimp (very expensive) to Sendy (very cheap).  All lists except for English and French have been moved over.  We need to work on issues like templates and segmentation, but are on the case.

Inactive correspondents: We’ve seen a large drop in the number of correspondents we’re showing because we have one-by-one been contacting, and then dropping, those who are inactive.  We may be down to 450 by the time we’re done.

LabourStart in Numbers: See my report this week — we haven’t seen spectacular growth anywhere, but all our Asian language lists have grown in recent days.

Security: Some of the pages on our campaigns site were exposing some email addresses of supporters – these are now password-protected or in the process of becoming password-protected.

Book [1]: We now have a Kindle edition of our campaigns book — we’ll begin publicizing this shortly.  Sales of the book remain strong; we’ve sold just under 500 copies in 5 weeks.

Book [2]: I completed the first draft of a book for Union Communication Services entitled “Making Unions Stronger – Using the Internet Better”.  A second draft is being sent off tomorrow.  Thanks to Edd and Derek for reading the whole thing through.

Fundraising: Not a great response from the GUFs and others we approached recently.  Today I’ll do a mailing to our “power users” — people who support our campaigns all the time, and will know how to value our work.  I need the help of all of you to raise funds to sustain our ever-growing campaigning.

Public appearances in the UK: We’ll be represented at three upcoming UK-based events.  On 19.1, I’ll be speaking at the Southend Labour Party. On 24.1, Edd will speak at the Unions 21 tech seminar. And on 13-14 March, we’re organizing a panel at the E-Campaigning Forum in Oxford.

Campaigns: We’re about to launch two new ones today – on El Salvador and the Philippines.  These are our first new campaigns in nearly 6 weeks — it has been a very quiet season.  As reported below, we now have the campaigns newswire working correctly in 19 languages, in both JavaScript and RSS versions – please make sure to promote this in your country.

Book: Sales have reached 377.  Let’s all push hard to get that number up to 500 over the next few days.  We were briefly an Amazon.co.uk best-seller, hitting the top 1,000 books they were selling, and reaching number 2 in our category.  A Kindle edition is coming soon, and we’re starting to think about doing another book.  Meanwhile, I expect to complete my book for UCS by the end of January – the working title is  Making Unions Stronger – Using The Internet Better.

Labour Newswire: We’ve pushed our newswires aggressively to UK unions, and it’s bearing fruit.  We had 40 UK sites listed, that dropped down to 20 after Edd removed all the dead wood, and now we’re back up to 28. You can see the up-to-date list of all 302 sites using our newswire here.

Today in Labour History: We now have 11 people adding content to this; almost every day, there is something on our front page in English.   (And more things coming soon.)

Inactive correspondents: Edd has gone through the 500 or so correspondents who’ve not been active, writing individually to each one, and giving support (such as new passwords) where needed.  In a few weeks, we’ll be deleting those who are showing no interest in continuing.

Upcoming global solidarity conferences: I’ve finally heard (today) from a colleague in Germany about the possibility of a conference in Berlin in May 2014; I’ll be following up.  Derek has been in discussions with people in Vancouver about a conference there in late 2014.

Fund-raising: We’ve gotten generous donations from two unions in the USA (United Steelworkers and the Amalgamated Transportation Union) and hoping for more.  We’ve sent out a few copies of the campaigns book to donors who have given £1,000 or more in the last couple of years.

Campaigns: We launched three campaigns during this 25-day period – “Cameroon: Musicians union march attacked by police“, “Nissan USA’s union busting is a global shame“, and “Netherlands: Union organizers, MP arrested; denied access to care-home workers“. We closed down several – including the Pakistan fire campaign (one of our very largest) and the Turkey DHL campaign. We’ve also started work on the ActNOW DIY project, but this is turning out to be quite complex and will take some time.

Campaign successes book: We’re nearly ready with this — a short book which we’ll distribute at cost which goes over our many victories in the last ten years.  The working title is Campaigning online – and winning: How LabourStart’s ActNOW campaigns are making unions stronger.

Labour Book of the Month: We’ve been exploring some interesting options including working with UK booksellers (three have come forward), reviving our account with Powells.com, selling magazine subscriptions (we’ve been talking with Hazards and International Union Rights), selling our TUC book on the Iraqi labour movement (we have 100 in stock) and selling our campaign successes book (see above).  At present, we earn very, very little from our bookselling partnership with UCS.

Today in Labour History: This is nearly complete – we can now have multiple users and we’ve already got quite a few dates in the database, which can now be sorted by country and language, just like LabourStart’s news database.

Fundraising: We’ve now sent out our brochure and individual letters to the heads of every union in Australia.

Labour Newswires: Edd has gone through the whole directory deleting all the dead links and we’re down to 286 sites that use the newswire — 40% of where we were before, when we had over 700. It’s time to rebuild the list by getting all the newswires working, adding new ones, and promoting them aggressively.

Conferences: Work has begun — initially just some exploratory emails — on a Berlin conference in May 2014. Oh yes, and we held a Global Solidarity Conference in Sydney.

I’ve fixed the script that shows us how many people have participated in at least 25 LabourStart campaigns — and it turns out that there are 7,256 of them.

This is a staggering number, I think. It’s our hardcore, the people who can be counted upon to nearly always support our efforts.

Once you keep this number in mind, it’s actually surprising how small some of our campaigns are — after all, if only the hardcore supporters sign up, that pretty much covers everyone.  Where are the casual supporters?

I think we need to make a special effort to engage with these people, to involve them in building a wider audience for the campaigns, and in getting their support for our fundraising. Use the comments to let me know what you think.

In response to Andy’s suggestion (see comments, below):

I’ve now looked into this.  Unfortunately, the database we’re reading doesn’t allow a breakdown by language.  The data we collect for each campaign participant is name, country, email address – not language.  In each case, the record does include the code for the specific campaign, so it would be possible to read the campaigns database and what language it is in, and then process the numbers.  But this would be a more ambitious programming job than I can manage.  If there is someone with PHP and MySQL skills who thinks this is important and wants to do it, let me know.

This is almost certainly going to be the last weekly summary before December — on Thursday I’m off to Sydney for the third annual LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference and will not be back before 2 December.  Some highlights from the last week:

Conference – going well, lots of last minute work dealing with people coming, cancelling, the programme, lunches, etc.  The Facebook Event page had to be cleaned up a bit as we were getting spammed.  Today – with only a week to go – we have 193 people registered to attend, of those 145 from Australia and 5 from New Zealand.

Campaigns – we got permission to close down the Pakistan campaign.  On Friday we got our first campaign request ever from the International Federation of Musicians — we’ll launch this later today.  The Guatemala campaign is two months old; I asked the sponsor what they wanted to do.  Meanwhile, the Bahrain campaign is well over 10,000 names making it one of the largest we’ve ever done.

Book of the month – we did our second one last Monday, and by Wednesday I was growing concerned that 98% of those who were clicking through to learn more about the book were not ordering it.  I then did a survey on Survey Monkey to find out why.  We got a very large number of responses (482 and counting) and I’ll close the survey tomorrow and will publish a summary here.  We’ve learned a lot, I think, from this experience.

Publicity – on Monday I was interviewed by a journalist from a Swiss-German left-wing magazine called Woz.  They did a similar interview more than a decade ago – this was the follow-up.  He strongly suggested that we work closely with LaborNet Germany – I followed up by sending a message to all three leading figures, but have not yet gotten a response.

Regional RSS feeds – I was able to fix the Caribbean region, meaning that now I should be able to get all of them working again.  But this may not happen before December, unfortunately.

Course – on Wednesday, I did a 45 minute session for the European Trade Union Institute in Brussels — they had a dozen or so trade union officials from across the continent and using Skype video, I introduced them to online campaigning.

Fundraising – we’ve now mailed our brochure and a cover letter to every president of every union in the USA.

Conference: 183 people are registered so far – 133 from Australia, 50 from overseas. This is an increase of 43 in the last week. The organizing committee continues weekly meetings and preparations; a lot of work is being done to promote the event.

App for smartphones and tablets: I’ve been working very hard on the IUF app (version 2) and a LabourStart app is not far behind, now that I’ve gotten the hang of this.

Fundraising: We’ve written letters to accompany our brochures to over 100 local and regional unions in the UK and over 50 union presidents in the USA.

Campaigns: We launched a new one (Mexico) on Tuesday 6.11 and closed down another (Swaziland) on Friday, 9.11. We gave our Bahrain campaign another push after we learned that one of the two unionists (Jalila) was sent off to prison. As a result, that campaign picked up over 2,000 more supporters and now has just under 10,000 messages sent, making it one of our very largest.

South Africa: One month after my push to existing South African correspondents and an effort to recruit new ones, I can report some good news. Of the last 20 South African labour news stories (posted in the last 2 days), 18 were posted by COSATU and only two by Derek.