Inside LabourStart

Campaigns:

• The Korea campaign, closing today, was one of the largest we ever ran. In the last 13 days, it grew from 11,295, which was already pretty good, to 14,566 — a gain of 3,271 during the Christmas period.
• Our Kazakhstan campaign continues to grow, albeit slower — we’re now up to 10,731, a gain of over 730 in the last two weeks.
• We’ll be a launching a new campaign in support of United Steelworkers Canada after the new year. The earlier version was closed five days ago.
• We closed two other campaigns (Honduras and UN staff) a week ago.

Berlin 2014: We’re up to 241 registrants, 50 from Germany, 36 from the UK, and the remaining 155 from 51 other countries. In another 11 days, Tom and I head over to Berlin to meet the organizing committee there. I’ve done a mailing to all registrants and we now have the option to de-register people who cannot attend. As I’ve explained before, many of the registrants have asked about subsidies even though we’ve repeatedly explained that everyone must pay their own way.

Mailing lists: These continue to grow and grow. We’re ending the year with 97,100 addresses on our top three lists: English – 84,853; French – 7,112; Spanish – 5,135. A year ago, those three lists totalled 85,501— a net gain of 11,599, or nearly 14%.

Social networks:

• We picked up another 5 new Twitter followers in the last 5 days, bringing our total to 11,243. It was 8,115 a year ago — a growth of 3,128, or almost 39%. This is much higher than the growth of our mailing lists.
• We have considerably fewer supporters on Facebook, with only 8,267. A year ago that number was 5,877, so we’ve picked up 2,390 new fans on Facebook — a gain of over 40%.

Book and calendar sales:

• Calendar sales reached 221 by year’s end — disappointing, but not a disaster.  (We didn’t lose any money, and earned £172.)
• Sales of our latest book, Firefox OS for Activists, continue to slowly grow.  We sold 97 paperbacks and 115 Kindle editions, for a total of 212.
• I’ll report on sales of our other titles in the new year.

Campaigns: No new campaigns were added in the last 7 days — but we’ve seen tremendous support for the two most recent ones (Kazakhstan and Korea).

The Korea railway workers campaign is our second largest current campaign with 11,295 supporters – it will take another 3,262 to make it number 1, which is unlikely to happen. Still, we picked up 2,522 new supporters in the last 24 hours (that’s right — more than 100 per hour), so you never know.

Our next new campaign is scheduled for launch in the new year (in support of USW members in Canada at Crown Holdings – will replace the current campaign.)

We’ve been talking with the Georgian Trade Union Confederation (GTUC) about getting our campaigns up in the Georgian language and they’re keen to help.

One new feature of campaigns is I now do a mailing one week after campaign launch to the people who signed up. This is a one-off (they’re not necessarily on our mailing list) and I use it to update them on what’s happening, to thank them, and to encourage them to spread the word (with details on how to do this with Twitter, Facebook, emails, etc). These messages have a VERY high open rate and they are read, so I will do them for all future campaigns.  The next step is to see if we can do this in additional languages.

Mailing lists: I did a full report on the huge growth of our bigger mailing lists — nearly 16,000 new subscribers to the top 10 lists since January. See below for details.

Berlin 2014: The number of registrants has gone up by 26 this week, most of those coming from the UK and Germany. At the moment we have 223 registrants, 49 of them from Germany and 33 from the UK. The registration form is now available in Dutch — as well as English, German, and Russian. Tom and Eric will visit Berlin on 11 January to meet with the organizing committee, which is doing fantastic work on the ground. There’s now an ad with a link to the conference website on all LabourStart home pages in all languages. We now have a way to modify information submitted by registrants. People who live in Berlin and can offer “solidarity housing” now have the option to do so from the registration page. (About half the people who’ve signed up are requesting this, but many of those are people who I do not expect to attend the conference.) We’ve now made some block bookings at a local hotel and hostel — if you’ve not yet booked, please do so soon.

LabourStart’s top 10 mailing lists picked up a net gain of 15,586 subscribers in 2013 (so far).

The most impressive gain (in relative terms) was the Korean list which grew almost 20-fold in the last 12 months (and nearly all of that this week). The Dutch list grew by more than 80%.  The German list grew by more than 50% this year, which is great leading into 2014 and our conference in Berlin.

Of the larger lists, the net growth of 9,233 for the English list is impressive.  The only lists in the top ten that will need to be pushed harder next year are Italian and Turkish.

Here is the full list, with the current size followed by where we stood a year ago.

• English 84,446 (75,213) +9,233
• French 6,841 (5,932) +909
• Spanish 5,148 (4,356) +792
• Italian 4,001 (3,879) +122
• German 3,875 (2,551) +1,324
• Turkish 3,272 (3,111) +161
• Norwegian 2,903 (2,333) +570
• Russian 2,175 (1,949) +226
• Korean 1,716 (93) +1,623
• Dutch 1,407 (781) +626

One of my ongoing gripes is that unions that ask LabourStart for campaigns sometimes do very little to promote them to their own members.  An opportunity to bring members of a new union, or even a new country, into the network of people who regularly support our campaigns is therefore missed.

In the past, I’ve chided some of our Korean comrades for this and in the last week we’ve seen a complete turnaround.  The Korean teachers union and the railway workers union have mobilized members and supporters in their own ranks, in their own country, and these have been added to the thousands from outside Korea to support our current campaigns.

The result is that our Korean language mailing list has grown ten-fold almost overnight, from just over 150 (where it had languished for months) to 1,646 this morning.  It has gone from being our 21st largest language to being our 9th.

The real test will be what happens when we mail to this list about a non-Korean campaign – for example, our current campaign on Kazakhstan.  Will we see a strong response?  We’ll try to test this later today.

Campaigns: In the last 2 weeks we launched two new ones — in support of striking railway workers in Korea, and jailed oil workers in Kazakhstan.  Both are exceptionally important — these are dramatic struggles where workers are up against the power of the state, and I hope everyone will do their bit to make these campaigns among our biggest ever.  We’ll be launching a followup campaign next week for the Crown Holdings workers in Canada.  I hope after that we’ll be able to take a short break before the new year — to catch our collective breath …

Mailing lists: Due to an extraordinary effort by the Korean teachers’ union to build support in the country for their campaign, we picked up several hundred Koreans for our mailing list.  As a result, Korean has gone from being our 21st largest list to being the 11th largest, with 714 subscribers (this was just 173 a month ago).

Berlin 2014: Two weeks ago I reported that we had 128 people signed up for the conference; today that number is 197.  The largest groups are from Germany (44), the UK (24), Pakistan (15), Liberia (12) and Nigeria (11).  I’m still not certain that the comrades from Pakistan, Liberia and Nigeria and some other countries have fully understood that LabourStart is not covering airfares, although it’s possible that some of them will be in Berlin for the ITUC.  The registration form is now available in Russian as well as English and German; we expect that a Dutch version is on the way.  Tom and Edd developed a comprehensive strategy for promoting the conference to a UK audience, so we should see the size of the UK contingent grow.  Meanwhile, I’ve focussed some attention on building participation from Finland, Denmark, Israel, the Czech Republic and Poland, with more countries coming soon.

Books: We’re about to begin work on book 4 — a collection of essays by former IUF General Secretary Dan Gallin.  Sales of the earlier books and calendar remain sluggish.

Our mailing lists grew slightly smaller as despite running new campaigns, we were running them to the same audiences, not picking up new ones. (We’re down over 600 subscribers this month.) It’s vitally important that unions which partner with us when doing a campaign understand this — otherwise our list will continue to fall little by little every month.

And though our numbers on social networks are steadily rising, there was a falling off of traffic to our websites.

The previous month’s numbers are in brackets below.

Mailing lists

Total for all lists: 117,869 [118,504]

English: 83,669 [84,236]
French: 6,813 [6,828]
Spanish: 5,138 [5,140]
Italian: 4,002 [4,026]
German: 3,870 [3,886]
Turkish: 3,272 [3,274]
Norwegian: 2,911 [2,927]
Russian: 2,091 [2,089]
Dutch: 1,414 [1,426]
Chinese: 1,073 [1,078]
Finnish: 584 [570]
Japanese: 334 [334]
Arabic: 321 [322]
Polish: 281 [282]
Portuguese: 263 [256]
Tagalog: 254 [254]
Hebrew: 246 [247]
Farsi: 241 [245]
Indonesian: 199 [182]
Swedish: 192 [195]
Korean 178 [177]
Danish: 134 [137]
Czech: 86 [88]
Esperanto: 75 [74]
Thai: 68 [68]
Greek: 59 [60]
Hindi: 40 [40]
Slovak: 19 [19]
Bulgarian: 18 [19]
Creole: 12 [13]
Vietnamese:12 [12]

Social networks

Twitter followers

English: 10,774 [10,478]
Canada English: 2,521 [2,430]
Canada French: 318 [304]
French: 194 [189]
USA: 78 [57]
Spanish: 63 [62]
Japanese: 23 [23]
Russian: 16 [16]
German: 15 [15]
Portuguese: 7 [7]

Facebook
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 8,167 [7,998]
Members of LabourStart group: 6,281 [6,106]
Like LabourStart page (French): 350 [343]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 129 [129]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 103 [99]

UnionBook
Members: 5,657 [5,635]

LinkedIn
LabourStart group: 1,465 [1,429]

Flickr
Union group on Flickr: 740 [738]

Website

Correspondents: 678 [673]

Website traffic

LabourStart.org (1&1 statistics)

Total visits: 629,107 [669,594]
Peak day: 26,535 [27,154]
Page impressions: 1,556,129 [1,707,274]

LabourStart.org (Clicky)

Total visitors: 51,338 [63,424]
Peak day: 5,127 [4,966]
Where they come from:
USA – 9,902 [11,091]
Indonesia – 8,133 [12,967]
Canada –  7,865 [10,208]
UK – 6,885 [8,086]
Australia – 2,785 [3,179]
Norway – 1,748 [1,897]
Germany – 944 [932]
Sweden – 913 [966]
France – 788 [807]
Netherlands – 679 [—]

LabourStartCampaigns.net (Clicky)

Total visitors: 28,299 [41,088]
Peak day: 5,181 [6,044]
Where they come from:
UK – 5,841 [5,809]
USA – 4,997 [5,821]
Canada – 4,076 [6,692]
Australia – 1,798 [1,882]
Spain – 1,101 [1,787]
France – 966 [1,216]
Belgium – 925 [1,649]
Norway – 778 [1,017]
Germany – 742 [1,669]
Netherlands 626 —

Gains are reported in green and losses in red.  Previous month’s numbers in brackets.

Mailing lists

Total for all lists: 118,464 [116,485]

English: 84,236 [83,741]
French: 6,828 [6,717]
Spanish: 5,140 [4,994]
Italian: 4,026 [4,004]
German: 3,886 [3,323]
Turkish: 3,274 [3,281]
Norwegian: 2,927 [2,472]
Russian: 2,089 [2,093]
Dutch: 1,426 [1,376]
Chinese: 1,078 [1,010]
Finnish: 570 [577]
Japanese: 334 [334]
Arabic: 322 [315]
Polish: 282 [282]
Portuguese: 256 [247]
Tagalog: 254 [254]
Hebrew: 247 [225]
Farsi: 245 [213]
Swedish: 195 [193]
Indonesian: 182 [163]
Korean 177 [154]
Danish: 137 [137]
Czech: 88 [88]
Esperanto: 74 [61]
Thai: 68 [68]
Greek: 60 [60]
Hindi: 40 [40]
Slovak: 19 [19]
Bulgarian: 19 [19]
Creole: 13 [13]
Vietnamese: 12 [12]

Social networks

Twitter followers –

English: 10,478 [10,266]
Canada English: 2,430 [2,289]
Canada French: 304 [234]
French: 189 [187]
Spanish: 62 [59]
USA: 57 [31]
Japanese: 23 [23]
Russian: 16 [15]
German: 15 [15]
Portuguese: 7 [7]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 7,998 [7,925]
Members of LabourStart group: 6,106 [5,936]
Like LabourStart page (French): 343 [340]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 129 [127]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 99 [99]

UnionBook –
Members: 5,635 [5,627]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,429 [1,403]

Union group on Flickr: 738 [734]

Website

Correspondents: 673 [663]

Website traffic

LabourStart.org (1&1 statistics)

Total visits: 669,594 [623,875]
Peak day: 27,154 [34,420]
Page impressions: 1,707,274 [1,845,122]

LabourStart.org (Clicky)

Total visitors: 63,424 [51,799]
Peak day: 4,966 [7,798]
Where they come from:
*** Indonesia – 12,967 [4,665] ***
USA – 11,091 [9,789]
Canada – 10,208 [9,138]
UK – 8,086 [8,469]
Australia – 3,179 [3,048]
Norway – 1,897 [1,733]
Sweden – 966 [935]
Germany – 932 [867]
Belgium – 842
France – 807

LabourStartCampaigns.net (Clicky)

Total visitors: 41,088 [42,534]
Peak day: 6,044 [11,817]
Where they come from:
Canada – 6,692 [9,197]
USA – 5,821 [6,482]
UK – 5,809 [7,119]
Australia – 1,882 [2,561]
Spain – 1,787 [1,456]
Germany – 1,669 [1,115]
Belgium – 1,649 [1,074]
Italy – 1,335
France – 1,216 [1,091]
Norway – 1,017

Following up on popular requests (well, Derek), I’ve added some website stats this month.

These should be taken with a grain of salt — actually, a bucket-load of salt.

We are increasingly using Clicky to measure our web traffic and that’s the only system we use on the campaign pages.

The Clicky code has not been placed on every single page on LabourStart.org (the news site), but it should also give a good indication of the number of actual visitors to the live section of the website.

So, why is 1&1 giving a much larger number?

Hard to tell — some of that is, strangely enough, “internal traffic” from 1&1’s own servers, a lot of it will be robots and spammers.

Over time, we’ll put the Clicky code on even more pages on our site to try to make sure that we’re not missing anything, but we’re certainly not missing traffic to our home pages in the various languages.  (Except French, which only moved over to the new system in mid-month, and is therefore missing Clicky stats for the first part of the month.)

Starting next month, we’ll be able to compare, to note any increases if they happen.

Already, interesting to note fairly high traffic from countries which don’t play a big role in our campaigns, but seem to come visit our news pages — Indonesia and India in particular.  I can’t really explain the surge in interest from South Korea to our campaigns pages — it didn’t translate into people signing up to campaigns in Korean, though perhaps they were directed to a different language by a link somewhere.  (75 people from South Korea did sign the English language message to Ban Ki-moon.)

The most important day, all three sets of statistics agree on this, was Monday, 23 September — the day we launched our campaign targetting UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.  Somewhere between 12,000 and 34,000 trade unionists visited LabourStart on that day.

New! Website traffic

LabourStart.org (1&1 statistics)

Total visits: 623,875
Peak day: 34,420 on 23.9
Page impressions: 1,845,122

LabourStart.org (Clicky)

Total visitors: 51,799
Peak day: 7,798 on 23.9
Where they come from:
USA – 9,789
Canada – 9,138
UK – 8,469
Indonesia – 4,665
Australia – 3,048
Norway – 1,733
New Zealand – 1,226
India – 1,021
Sweden – 935
Germany – 867

LabourStartCampaigns.net (Clicky)

Total visitors: 42,534
Peak day: 11,817 on 23.9
Where they come from:
Canada – 9,197
UK – 7,119
USA – 6,482
Australia – 2,561
Spain – 1,456
New Zealand – 1,363
Germany – 1,115
South Korea – 1,102
France – 1,091
Belgium – 1,074

Mailing lists

New! Total for all lists: 116,485

[This was 103,324 8 months ago – a net gain of 13,161 new subscribers, or 1,645 per month]

English: 83,741 [81,907]
French: 6,717 [6,443]
Spanish: 4,994 [4,905]
Italian: 4,004 [4,017]
German: 3,323 [3,312]
Turkish: 3,281 [3,283]
Norwegian: 2,472 [2,433]
Russian: 2,093 [2,051]
Dutch: 1,376 [1,377]
Chinese: 1,010 [1,011]
Finnish: 577 [577]
Japanese: 334 [334]
Arabic: 315 [313]
Polish: 282 [282]
Tagalog: 254 [254]
Portuguese: 247 [248]
Hebrew: 225 [215]
Farsi: 213 [207]
Swedish: 193 [195]
Indonesian: 163 [153]
Korean 154 [154]
Danish: 137 [137]
Czech: 88 [88]
Thai: 68 [68]
Esperanto: 61 [55]
Greek: 60 [60]
Hindi: 40 [40]
Slovak: 19 [19]
Bulgarian: 19 [19]
Creole: 13 [13]
Vietnamese: 12 [12]

Social networks

Twitter followers –

English: 10,266 [10,033]
Canada English: 2,289 [2167]
Canada French: 234 [219]
French: 187
Spanish: 59
USA: 31 New!
Japanese: 23
German: 15
Russian: 15
Portuguese: 7

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English):7,925 [7,832]
Members of LabourStart group: 5,936 [5,689]
Like LabourStart page (French): 340 [329]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 127 [126]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 99 [97]

UnionBook –
Members: 5,627 [5,610]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,403 [1,383]

Union group on Flickr: 734 [732]

Website

Correspondents: 663 [670]

Some highlights this month (keeping in mind that August is normally a very quiet month):

• We have finally reached 10,000 followers on Twitter – our global, English feed.
• More people are joining our group on Facebook (58) than liking our page (39).

Mailing lists

English: 81,907 [81,875]
French: 6,443 [6,413]
Spanish: 4,905 [4,886]
Italian: 4,017 [4,021]
German: 3,312 [3,295]
Turkish: 3,283 [3,284]
Norwegian: 2.433 [2,441]
Russian: 2,051 [2,049]
Dutch: 1,377 [1,359]
Chinese: 1,011 [1,011]
Finnish: 577 [575]
Japanese: 334 [334]
Arabic: 313 [313]
Polish: 282 [282]
Tagalog: 254 [253]
Portuguese: 248 [245]
Hebrew: 215 [217]
Farsi: 207 [207]
Swedish: 195 [195]
Korean 154 [154]
Indonesian: 153 [152]
Danish: 137 [137]
Czech: 88 [88]
Thai: 68 [68]
Greek: 60
Esperanto: 55 [52]
Hindi: 40 [39]
Slovak: 19 [19]
Bulgarian: 19
Creole: 13
Vietnamese: 12 [12]

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 10,033 [9,936]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 7,832 [7,793]
Members of LabourStart group: 5,689 [5,631]
Like LabourStart page (French): 329 [324]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 126 [124]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 97 [94]

UnionBook –
Members: 5,610 [5,594]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,383 [1,376]

Union group on Flickr: 732 [729]

Website

Correspondents: 670 [665]

This report has been delayed by about ten days due to my holiday.

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains (100 or more) are highlighted in bold.

Highlights:

• German has moved up to being our 5th largest mailing list.
• We have a new mailing list – in Hindi.
• For the first time ever, the top five languages have over 100,000 subscribers — that’s English, French, Spanish, Italian and German.
• The total of all active lists is now 113,976.
• We’re just under 10,000 followers on Twitter – and we should reach that goal any day now.
• More people sign up to follow us on Twitter than like us on Facebook — by nearly two-to-one.
• Our Facebook group is growing much faster than our ‘likes’ for our page.

Mailing lists

English: 81,875 [80,623]
French: 6,413 [6,162]
Spanish: 4,886 [4,750]
Italian: 4,021 [3,990]
German: 3,295 [3,199]
Turkish: 3,284 [3,279]
Norwegian: 2,441 [2,438]
Russian: 2,049 [2,046]
Dutch: 1,359 [1,320]
Chinese: 1,011 [1,011]
Finnish: 575 [573]
Japanese: 334 [333]
Arabic: 313 [312]
Polish: 282 [281]
Tagalog: 253 [231]
Portuguese: 245 [244]
Hebrew: 217 [209]
Farsi: 207 [207]
Swedish: 195 [196]
Korean 154 [153]
Indonesian: 152 [141]
Danish: 137 [138]
Czech: 88 [88]
Thai: 68 [68]
Esperanto: 52 [50]
Hindi: 39
Slovak: 19
Vietnamese: 12 [12]

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 9,936 [9,710]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 7,793 [7,673]
Members of LabourStart group: 5,631 [5,433]
Like LabourStart page (French): 324 [318]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 124 [112]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 94 [83]

UnionBook –
Members: 5,594 [5,557]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,376 [1,348]

Union group on Flickr: 729 [728]

Website

Correspondents: 665 [649]