Inside LabourStart

Of the 3,185 people who voted so far in our photo of the year competition, more than 20% were not on our mailing list but have agreed to be added to it.  The net gain for our English language is 682 new subscribers.

Interestingly, as these were added in four batches of 700 each (there were around 2,800 who agreed to be added to our list, though most were already on it), we could track how many newcomers were in each batch.  The first group was mostly people who were already on our list, but by the time we reached the fourth group, they were nearly 40% people who came to the competition without having already been on our mailing list before.  In other words, the people who vote last in a competition like this are the most valuable to us — they’re the ones who learned about it, and LabourStart, from somewhere else.

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.)

Last year, we got fewer than 3,000 votes for the Labour Photo of the Year competition — the first time we did it.  This year, we got 60% of that number in the first 24 hours.  There is tremendous interest in this competition, which is great — let’s hope we continue to see a large number of votes cast and the involvement of thousands of trade unionists in this process.

I’ve just sent out the mass mailing in English.  You can cast your votes here.  Tomorrow will do more publicity.  Last year we had nearly 3,000 votes cast.   Let’s hope this year is even bigger.

The contest is closed now, we’re waiting while the judges discuss the entries and select the finalists.  That should be done by mid-week.  Then the voting begins.

In comparison with last year’s contest we have more submissions (189 vs. 118 last year).  I think we should be quite pleased by the growth in numbers as a surprising number of workers with cameras are reluctant (embarassed) to make their work too public.  Hope fully as the contest continues the numbers will grow each year.

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).

203 trade unionists have signed up to our group on Flickr and have submitted 182 photos for judging.  In another 12 hours, we’ll stop the submissions and tomorrow we’ll ask the judges to select a shortlist of five, and then we’ll begin the voting.

Last year, this resulted in several positive things and they’re worth remembering:

• We highlighted the great work of labour photographers – contributing in our own small way to encouraging our movement to generate its own content (photos, texts, etc), which is part of a broader project to reinvigorate the international trade union movement and its culture.
• We showed off many great struggles, reminders to everyone that unions can be dynamic and exciting organizations engaged in great battles.
• We raised LabourStart’s profile, meeting new people along the way, and we grew our mailing list by several hundred names.
• We managed to get one great photo (last year’s winner) onto the front cover of Amnesty International’s trade union magazine in the UK, in the glossy full-colour magazine of the Education International, and elsewhere.  The photo was very widely distributed on the web.

It’s worth remembering that the idea for this competition came from Mac Urata of the ITF and has been run largely by Derek Blackadder; they both deserve our thanks.  I think this year is going to be another success and hope that we get even more votes cast than we did last year.

The contest begins.   Publicized to our English list and our Facebook group (via email), to Twitter and UnionBook.  Let’s hope for another great competition and thanks to Derek for the hard work he’s done and will do on this.

• We’ve successfully upgraded our web hosting account with 1&1 Internet and now have 10 more MySQL databases we can fill up.
• Some changes to Twitter: we’ve taken some ideas from our Dutch edition, and have changed our Twitter icon from a red fist to a coffee cup, our background from a Korean photo to white, and the link on our home page to a very cute Twittering bird – which now links directly to our Twitter feed, where we have 992 followers.
• A lot more people have been invited to our conference and the list of those attending or invited is updated every day.
• The fundraising concert held in Sheffield earlier this month was not a huge success – but £50 was raised for LabourStart.
• Our French edition is now using an interesting Flickr box to display the photo of the day.
• Our photo of the year continues to appear in print — I just sent a packet containing several recent examples to the photographer.
• Two upcoming events: on 20.5 I’ll be doing a fringe meeting at the PCS union conference in Brighton on the subject of online campaigning.  The following week, I’m in Brussels doing a communicators event for the Education International on the same subject.

More great publicity – see here.