Inside LabourStart

This will be my last update for a while — I will be back at my desk on 12 August for a week and a half, and then back to work after the summer break on 28 August.

Mailing lists: I fixed the link on the English and new French home pages to ensure that anyone signing up to mailing lists there is added to our old MailChimp lists.  I migrated some who had subscribed (prematurely) to the new Sendy lists.  We’re not yet using Sendy for English or French, but we will.

Campaigns: I’ve sent out monthly reminders to our partners in general, and specific ones to our friends at the 3 Cosas campaign in London and GE workers in Erie, Pennsylvania campaign at the two-month mark.  We’ve promoted the Maruti Suzuki campaign in Hindi to more than 300 Indians who are on our English language mailing list.  We’re beginning to grow a small mailing list in Hindi as a result.

Books: I’ve followed up with CreateSpace and our bank about missing royalty payments totalling over £500.  We’ve been asked to ship 60 copies of our Global Labour Movement book to the founding congress of the International Domestic Workers Network in Montevideo in October.

Asia: I’ve followed up with the 15 trade union communicators I met at the recent ILO course in Turin, asking them to support, publicize, and translate our campaigns, and to signup as volunteer correspondents.

Publicity: I was interviewed this morning for an article to appear in Labour Research.

Kiev conference in November: Edd and I have been invited to participate in an event linking together trade unionists and democratic socialists from across the former Soviet Union.  One of the days will be devoted to a meeting of LabourStart correspondents from across the region.

Brussels course in October: I’ll be teaching trade unions from across Europe about campaigning in a course organized by the European Trade Union Institute.  I did this last year by Skype; this year, they’re bringing me over to Brussels.

LabourStart home page in French: Edd has done a lot more work on this and we are nearly ready for launch.  We’ll be meeting Andy in London in August and can finalize then.

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

Highlights:

• We now have 10 lists with 1,000 subscribers or more.
• The Dutch list grew by more than 50% – a spectacular growth.
• On Facebook, our Group continues to grow – by over 250 a month – despite no efforts by us to promote it. Within a few days, it will probably even be larger than UnionBook, which is growing very slowly.
• We’re picking 9 – 10 new Twitter followers every day (doing almost nothing to promote this) and as a result, we should reach 10,000 Twitter followers sometime in July.

Mailing lists

English: 80,623 [79,267] +1,356
French: 6,162 [6,046] +116
Spanish: 4,750 [4,660] +90
Italian: 3,990 [3,957] +33
Turkish: 3,279 [3,209] +70
German: 3,199 [2,906] +293
Norwegian: 2,438 [2,407] +31
Russian: 2,046 [1,962] +84
Dutch: 1,320 [879] +441
Chinese: 1,011 [828] +183
Finnish: 573 [560] +13
Japanese: 333 [300] +33
Arabic: 312 [299] +13
Polish: 281 [313] -32
Portuguese: 244 [241] +3
Tagalog: 231 [232] -1
Hebrew: 209 [207] +2
Farsi: 207 [213] -6
Swedish: 196 [178] +18
Korean 153 [154] -1
Danish: 138 [143] -5
Indonesian: 141 [128] +13
Czech: 88 [89] -1
Thai: 68 [67] +1
Esperanto: 50 [39] +11
Vietnamese: 12 [12]

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 9.710 [9,435] +275

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 7,673 [7,172] +501
Members of LabourStart group: 5,433 [5,180] +253
Like LabourStart page (French): 318 [312] +6
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 112 [102] +10
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 83 [75] +8

UnionBook –
Members: 5,557 [5,530] +27

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,348 [1,317] +31

Union group on Flickr: 728 [724] +4

Website

Correspondents: 649 [640] +9

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains (50 or more) are highlighted in bold.

Mailing lists

English: 79,267 [78,105] +1,162
French: 6,046 [6,044]
Spanish: 4,660 [4,535] +125
Italian: 3,957 [3,914]
Turkish: 3,209 [3,208]
German: 2,906 [2,847] +59
Norwegian: 2,407 [2,390]
Russian: 1,962 [1,922]
Dutch: 879 [882]
Chinese: 828 [817]
Finnish: 560 [536]
Polish: 313 [314]
Japanese: 300 [262]
Arabic: 299 [299]
Portuguese: 241 [242]
Tagalog: 232 [228]
Farsi: 213 [213]
Hebrew: 207 [211]
Swedish: 178 [179]
Korean 154 [154]
Danish: 143 [144]
Indonesian: 128 [126]
Czech: 89 [89]
Thai: 67
Esperanto: 39
Vietnamese: 12

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 9,435 [9,177] +258

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 7,172 [6,596] +576
Members of LabourStart group: 5,180 [5,102] +78
Like LabourStart page (French): 312 [305]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 102 [102]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 75 [70] – new page launched this month

UnionBook –
Members: 5,530 [5,507]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,317 [1,272]

Union group on Flickr: 724 [721]

Website

Correspondents: 640 [633]

Campaigns: The Bangladesh campaign is one of our very largest, with over 14,000 messages sent — we got a big boost from the British TUC which did an image that went viral and brought a lot of attention the campaign. We will probably close this soon as IndustriALL and UNI have made a lot of progress this week.

The Hong Kong campaign closed and we’ve asked about closing the Mexico campaign after three months — waiting to hear from IndustriALL about that one. We asked the RMT in the UK if we could close the “Justice for the 33” campaign and have been asked to continue to run with it for another month or so.

In addition to publicizing our own campaigns, we were asked to do mailings and promote Amnesty International’s new campaign in support of releasing jailed Bahraini teacher Mahdi, which we did. We also did a special promotion on Fiji for the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the ITUC.

On the technical side, we fixed some of the German text, got an Indonesian ActNOW newswire working, and have made more progress on the new campaigns database which will make our translators’ job considerably easier.

News home pages: Edd’s been working on some of the more complex language home pages which have not yet been moved over to the new format (Dutch, Polish); Eric will be completing work on the French version in the next few days. We fixed a lot of things on the country pages this week, including how campaigns appear (now showing the photo from the most recent campaign and horizontal lines to separate them); news stories that appear in the top 10 don’t repeat in the stories below; when a state/province/region appears in the headline (e.g., England), it now appears in a different colour (as it does in the list of stories); there’s now an ad for the new book on all the country pages in English; the “for more info” link now appears again on all stories where there’s something in that field.

Book 2: Sales are going well; we’ve sold 180 copies — 156 of them this week. We’ll begin work on a Kindle edition this week. Matt H. has volunteered to work on a German edition of this (and the previous book).

Berlin/Vancouver 2014: Edd’s been in touch with some German comrades and we’re making slow and steady progress. Derek is talking to comrades in Canada about a global solidarity conference there as well.

Mailing list: We had a problem with the latest version of our Sendy software — it was screwing up character encoding. This was now fixed.

CloudFlare: The adoption of CloudFlare, which we pay to ensure that our site is accessible everywhere at an improved speed, and which will keep us going even if we go offline for a while, has caused some teething pains. One of them was a delay in seeing the new photo of the day, which Derek has been posting. This has now been fixed.

Today in Labour History: I noticed that the word ‘more’ would appear even when there was no more; this has now been fixed. We have a lot more stories in the database now and a big thanks to Andy for translating so many of them into French.

Fund-raising: The ITF has pledged to donate something, and we’re expecting a donation from the RMT as well, which voted at its conference last year to support LabourStart. In addition, we’ve put in requests for grants for specific purposes to two UK-based charities — the Lipman-Miliband Trust and the Edge Fund.

Some highlights:

• Mailing lists growing quickly (100 or more new subscribers this month) include English, French, and Chinese.
• Big growth on social networks (100 or more new ones this month) are our Facebook page and group in English and our Twitter feed in English.

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains are highlighted in bold.

Mailing lists

English: 78,105 [76,648]
French: 6,044 [5,868]
Spanish: 4,535 [4,462]
Italian: 3,914 [3,888]
Turkish: 3,208 [3,116]
German: 2,847 [2,798]
Norwegian: 2,390 [2,369]
Russian: 1,922 [1,951]
Dutch: 882 [885]
Chinese: 817 [717]
Finnish: 536 [548]
Polish: 314 [318]
Arabic: 299 [267]
Japanese: 262 [240]
Portuguese: 242 [246]
Tagalog: 228 [205]
Farsi: 213 [207]
Hebrew: 211 [209]
Swedish: 179 [183]
Korean 154 [150]
Danish: 144 [144]
Indonesian: 126 [116]
Czech: 89 [96]

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 9,177 [8,881]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 6,596 [6,387]
Members of LabourStart group: 5,102 [4,925]
Like LabourStart page (French): 305 [294]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 102 [96]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 70 [0] – new page launched this month

UnionBook –
Members: 5,507 [5,481]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,272 [1,233]

Union group on Flickr: 721 [720]

Website

Correspondents: 633 [624]

The biggest news:

I just set up CloudFlare as a way of ensuring that LabourStart stays online no matter what.  It should also theoretically really speed up the display of our site, anywhere in the world.  It should kick in sometime in the next 48 hours.  If LabourStart suddenly becomes unusable  that probably means I did something wrong with the setup. In that case, please email me making sure not to use a labourstart.org address — email me at labourstart@fastmail.fm, which will get through.  Make sure you note that email address now, as this blog will also become inaccessible if our site goes offline.

Other news:

Facebook: We have a new Hebrew language Facebook page, updated daily and picking up followers fairly quickly.  We’re up to 48 likes.  We also have pages in Turkish (99 likes), French (300 likes) and English (6,441 likes).  We only have 209 people on our Hebrew language mailing list, so this is quite good — 1 in 4 are now Facebook fans.  If we had the same result in English, we’d have something like 19,000 fans on Facebook.

New home page: The new home page is now working in 11 languages and should be working in all 29 by the end of this week.  Following a vigorous discussion about the logo, we’ll make a decision in the next few days.

New pages for countries and state/provinces: This is also being configured according to the new design, and hugely improved.  See for example the new UK home page at http://www.labourstart.org.uk.

Campaigns: The Hong Kong dock workers remains our latest, with over 7,300 messages sent so far, though we will likely be launching a new one today for the ITF.  We’ve added a prominent link on campaigns to Reddit which, according to participants in the recent e-Campaigning Forum, can be a very effective way to boost traffic to a site (at no cost).  Two of our oldest campaigns — Nissan USA and the Philippines — have been closed.  A new version of a Canada-only campaign has also been launched, with over 600 messages this week.

Mailing lists: We now have a mailing list in Thai with 49 subscribers, and our first campaign in that language.

Book: We’re nearly done with the writing of our introduction to the global labour movement — we hope to go to press this Friday and have copies ready for sale by 4th May, when we hold the LabourStart May Day party in London.

May Day party:  This important fund-raising event takes place on 4th May this year at the Bread & Roses pub in London.  I’m hoping to raise up to £1,000 pounds.  So far, over 200 people have either confirmed their attendance or said they may come (slightly more say they will definitely come).  The general secretary of the ITF is due to speak, as are others.  Two performers have volunteered to provide the entertainment for the evening — Dave Thorpe and The Ruby Kid.

Today in Labour History: Edd’s added many more items, as we need to ensure that we have at least one for each month for each of the major countries.  This appears on the bottom of our UK page, if you want to see what it looks like.  Comrades who can help should contact us intern@labourstart.org

Dormant languages: We’ve identified 11 languages where correspondents have ceased posting news — we’ll need to chase them up and find replacements, but if comrades have any suggestions they’d be most welcome.  The languages are:

Campaigns: We launched two new campaigns this week, both focussing on Asia. One is in defense of labour rights activist Andy Hall, threatened with jail and a multi-million dollar fine in Thailand. The other is in support of Hong Kong’s dockworkers, on strike for more than a week. We added a graphical link to Reddit which you can see on the Hong Kong campaign — we’ll be working to make this more useful in the next few days.

Helping our friends: We devoted one of our mass mailings in English last week to promoting — for a second time — the IUF’s current campaign targetting Mondelez (Kraft) for its violations of workers rights in Tunisia and Egypt. As a result of that extra push, we helped this turn into the largest online campaign the IUF has ever run. We also gave a special push to Radio Labour last week, timing the launch of the Andy Hall campaign to coincide with an interview they did with him. The result was a record 4,000 listeners to the interview. We also helped three GUFs (ITF, UNI and IndustriALL) as well as our correspondents by sharing with them (the correspondents) details of three new jobs at the GUFs in campaigns and communications.

Our home page: The photo of day/week is no longer a fixed height, as Derek requested. And I’ve publicized the 9 logos Masha prepared for us to correspondents by email, getting a lot of comments. We’ll make a decision soon.

Our second book: A first draft is now ready and we hope to have the book in hand in time for our May Day party in London.

Internationalization: We now have a mailing list in Thai (46 names) and will soon begin mailing to it. We have the beginnings of a LabourStart Facebook page in Hebrew as well.

Fundraising: We did a mailing last Wednesday to 12,867 “power campaigners” — people who have supported at least 5 of our campaigns in the last year. We asked each person to donate $50 to LabourStart and I set myself the fairly randomly-chosen goal of hoping that we’d get 1% of that list to give an average of $50 each — for a total of £4,271. We reached over 95% of that target by this morning, less than five days after the fundraising campaign began. We are also continuing to build for the LabourStart May Day party/fundraiser in London on May 4th. 162 people have said they are either coming (80) or thinking of coming (82).

Publicity: We had a very complimentary article appear in the German newspaper Woz (see details below).

Survey: We sent out a summary of the results of our annual survey of trade union use of the net to all our readers.

Mailing list migration: We’ve nearly completed the migration of our mailing lists from MailChimp to Sendy. Still working on the issue of templates, and for the moment, French and English lists remain on MailChimp, costing us a small fortune every month.

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains are highlighted in bold.

Mailing lists

English: 76,648 [76,322]
French: 5,868 [5,893]
Spanish: 4,462 [4,504]
Italian: 3,888 [3,888]
Turkish: 3,116 [3,116]
German: 2,798 [2,614]
Norwegian: 2,369 [2,369]
Russian: 1,951 [1,951]
Dutch: 885 [885]
Chinese: 717 [716]
Finnish: 548 [546]
Polish: 318 [318]
Arabic: 267 [252]
Portuguese: 246 [246]
Japanese: 240 [240]
Hebrew: 209 [208]
Farsi: 207 [207]
Tagalog: 205 [205]
Swedish: 183 [183]
Korean 150 [150]
Danish: 144 [144]
Indonesian : 116 [109]
Czech: 96 [96]

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 8,881 [8,659]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 6,387 [6,327]
Members of LabourStart group: 4,925 [4,909]
Like LabourStart page (French): 294 [279]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 96 [92]

UnionBook –
Members: 5,481 [5,440]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,233 [1,194]

Union group on Flickr: 720 [720]

Website

Correspondents: 624 [613]

Absence: I will be travelling all of next week, back at work on 1st April. Edd will cover for me in the office.

Campaigns launched: We launched a new UK-only campaign for the RMT — our third currently-active campaign for them.

Campaigns to come: In April we anticipate at least two new campaigns — DISK in Turkey wants our help dealing with a German employer who is trying to impose a yellow union on its employees. And UNI and BWI in Asia want us to campaign on behalf of an anti-trafficking campaigner (and LabourStart correspondent) who is being taken to court by a company in Thailand.

Campaigns closed: We closed two campaigns in the last two weeks — Netherlands (FNV) and El Salvador. No clear result in either case.

Campaign improvements: There will be a number of improvements in light of things I learned recently. In all upcoming campaigns, we’ll try to include a Radio Labour component; Marc Belanger has kindly offered to interview key people and we’ll integrate this into the campaigns. I’ve fixed how the campaigns will show when we link to them on Facebook — it will no longer show by default the LabourStart logo, and instead will allow us to choose a better photo from the campaign page itself. Finally, when we’d look at closed campaigns, the number of supporters shown was always wrong. This has now been fixed.

Mass mailings: We did our first A/B testing — see below. Interesting results.

New website design: Launched around 11 days ago. We are now working on getting many of the internal pages to conform to the new design. Masha has suggested a number of new logos. Derek pointed out two problems — top stories with long titles were over-writing the text below, and some stories were being orphaned over the three columns at the bottom; both now fixed. We learned that top news stories in other languages were appearing on the English home page; this too is now fixed.

Internationalization: We now have campaigns and mailings in Slovak. We have a home page displaying news in Korean (we’ve had Korean campaigns for some time). And our new home page design has been implemented in Esperanto — the first language other than English to use this.

The Global Labour Movement: An Introduction. Our second book — due for launch in early May. In addition to the bits that Edd is writing, we’ll have contributions from the British TUC, Amnesty International, ICTUR, the Global Labour Institutes, and Dan Gallin. And we have activists on the ground answering email interview questions about their relationship with the GUFs. Should be interesting and useful, and we hope to launch it on 4th May. Which brings us to …

LabourStart’s First-Ever May Day Party: Due to be held at London’s only union-owned pub, the Bread & Roses, on 4th May. We’re building interest in this and intend to push it very hard throughout April.

Public speeches: I spoke last week in Oxford at the annual e-Campaigning Forum, on a panel with Anita Gardner of IndustriALL and again on the closing panel. Next Sunday, I’ve been invited to speak at a fringe meeting at the annual conference of Britain’s largest teachers’ union, the NASUWT, on the subject of jailed teacher trade unionists.

Third Annual Survey of Trade Union Use of the Net: Closed today. Expect a report shortly.

Everyone has an opinion about this, but for the first time, LabourStart has done what’s called A/B testing on one of our regular mailings.

Basically, we told MailChimp to write to 10% of the people on our list with one subject line, used a different subject line for another 10%, and then wait 24 hours.  The content of the message stayed the same.  The subject line that generated the most opens was then automatically selected for the remaining 80% of the list.

The results were as follows:

• When the subject line was Victory: Valentin Urusov and Basile Mahan Gahé are now free, 14.5% of the recipients opened the message – a total of 1,116.
• When the subject line didn’t include their names — it was simply Victory: Jailed union leaders freed — 15.5% of the recipients opened the message, a total of 1,190.

In other words, the subject line that was free of names generated 74 more opens than the other, which would have translated to 740 additional opens over the entire list.

It’s not a massive difference, but it’s interesting.

Another thing we may want to test is whether mentioning a country name helps or hinders (e.g., Union leaders jailed vs Korean union leaders jailed).