Inside LabourStart

This is 10 days late because I was away during the first week of October. There are no website stats this time because I wasn’t able to access them this morning and didn’t want to delay publication of this report any further.

Some highlights:

Net growth of mailing lists is still strong, with over 2,500 new subscribers this month. The biggest gain was the English list, which picked up a net gain of over 2,000. I’m now listing Indonesian at the bottom as we’re doing regular mailings to this small list, and running regular campaigns in Indonesian now.

On Facebook, likes to our page continue to grow considerably faster than membership in our group, which is what we want. This month we had a gain of 333 new likes to the page and only 6 new members of the group.

Twitter is growing more slowly, up only 251 this month, but we still have far more followers on Twitter than we have likes on Facebook. (7,418 Twitter followers vs 5,289 fans on Facebook).

On LinkedIn, despite no effort by us, we’ve now soared past the 1,000 barrier, having picked up 46 new members of our group there. That’s only one fewer than the number of new members of UnionBook (which grew by only 47 during this period).

Mailing lists

Total for all lists: 104,296 [101,775]

English: 75,597 [73,544]
French: 5,813 [5,777]
Spanish: 4,338 [4,177]
Italian: 3,872 [3,868]
Turkish: 3,114 [2,989]
German: 2,546 [2,497]
Norwegian: 2,344 [2,301]
Russian: 1,950 [1,945]
Dutch: 739 [738]
Chinese: 503 [500]
Polish: 308 [306]
Portuguese: 244 [243]
Japanese: 209 [ 209]
Farsi: 201 [201]
Hebrew: 189 [177]
Swedish: 187 [189]
Finnish: 184 [184]
Arabic: 169 [160]
Danish: 150 [153]

And just below the radar:

Korean 93 [93]
Indonesian 74

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,322 [5,275]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 5,289 [4,956]
Members of LabourStart group: 4,778 [4,772]
Like LabourStart page (French): 234 [222]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 67 [60]

Twitter followers –
English: 7,418 [7,167]

Union group on Flickr: 701 [698]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,037 [991]

Website

Correspondents: 1,028 [1,013]

Highlights this month –

Though August is traditionally a quiet month, and this is reflected in the lack of growth for the top mailing lists, we had a huge growth in our Turkish list (up by more than 50%, a gain of over 1,000 subscribers) and the German list grew by 202 subscribers, a gain of nearly 10%. In social networks, we’re rapidly approaching 5,000 ‘likes’ for our Facebook page in English, with another nearly 300 in French and Turkish. We’re just under 1,000 members of our LinkedIn group – which we’ve done absolutely nothing to publicize. We’re finally over 1,000 correspondents (and will need to soon starting weeding out the inactive ones). Finally, visits to the website soared for some reason in August, with a gain of almost 20% in unique visits and an additional 150,000 page views compared to July.

Mailing lists

Total for all lists: 101,775 [100,331]

English: 73,544 [73,474]
French: 5,777 [5,777]
Spanish: 4,177 [4,163]
Italian: 3,868 [3,873]
Turkish: 2,989 [1,897]
German: 2,497 [2,292]
Norwegian: 2,301 [2,281]
Russian: 1,945 [1,947]
Dutch: 738 [736]
Chinese: 500 [496]
Polish: 306 [306]
Portuguese: 243 [247]
Japanese: 209 [ 209]
Farsi: 201 [186]
Swedish: 189 [194]
Finnish: 184 [184]
Hebrew: 177 [157]
Danish: 153 [156]
Arabic: 160 [156]

And just below the radar:

Korean 93 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,275 [5,227]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 4,956 [4,787]
Members of LabourStart group: 4,772 [4,762]
Like LabourStart page (French): 222 [213]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 60

Twitter followers –
English: 7,167 [6,920]

Union group on Flickr: 698 [694]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 991 [951]

Website

Correspondents: 1,013 [994]

Unique visits to the site this month : 599,990 [509,378]
Peak day: 23,064 [23.8.12]
Page views this month: 1,312,682 [1,164,243]

Campaigns:

• I contacted Hava Is about their campaign (aviation workers in Turkey); they want to continue it for another month in part because of the ITF’s renewed commitment to this cause.
• There was a fairly large backlog of campaigns that had been translated, or mailings, that required additional work by me.  About two thirds of these have now been done, and I’ve asked translators to help out by posting the content directly themselves – this is now happening in German, for example.
• The page showing how campaigns are doing in all languages now continues a clear link to see the breakdown for each campaign, including showing countries.
• The Algeria campaign has been closed.
• We suffered a brief (hour long) distributed denial of service attack to our connection the new server in Iceland; following this, I discovered a fairly large number of spammers trying to sign up to our campaigns.  I removed all the ones I could identify from our mailing lists and then added a simple spam-prevention bit of code to the campaigns software (which had a bug in it that caused problems for about a day).
• I wrote to all translators showing them what was missing and encouraging them to translate all active campaigns and mass mailings.
• We’ve had campaigns translated into Indonesian and Portuguese for the first time in years – thanks to new volunteer translators.
• We’re about to launch a new campaign in support of public sector workers in Swaziland.

Conference: We had a Skype videoconference with Andrew and Alison in Sydney and Eric in London to clarify what’s being done, and what needs to be done, over the next three months.

Correspondents: I appealed to our 73,000+ subscribers in English for new correspondents; only 3 have volunteered so far (2 from the UK, one from Ireland).

Fundraising: I continue to mail out brochures to local labour councils throughout Ireland (including Northern Ireland) and to the 26 local labour councils in London.

Office: I continued the search for a new London office for LabourStart.

And all the usual stuff: The monthly “LabourStart in Numbers” report (see below).  Backups – every week – of the entire site, the mailing lists, and the databases.  New users added every day to UnionBook.  Regular postings to social media – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, UnionBook.  Answering dozens of LabourStart emails every day.

Update: There was a small bug – so people were not able to complete the sending of campaigns.  Now fixed.

A couple of days ago our campaigns site was down for an hour or more following a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on the company which hosts the connection to our new server in Iceland.  I have no idea if the attack was directed against us, but noticed today when updating our mailing lists that we’ve had dozens of people signing up to our campaigns with addresses like xkfrjw@flikjdk.com and random countries.

These are fairly easy to spot, as it’s very unlikely that a person with the email address of xkfrjw@flikjdk.com who says their country is the Falkland Islands is likely to sign up to our Norwegian language mailing list.  So I spent an hour today trying to clear many of these addresses from our lists.  MailChimp itself will purge them over time, so in that sense it doesn’t really matter much.

The problem, however, is that these spammers have been attempting to use our system.  It’s unlikely that they’ve been able to send out mail through it, but they may have been sending some of the recent campaign messages to our targets.  The numbers we’re talking about our quite low – perhaps a few dozen attempts we can see.

I looked into using a CAPTCHA system but it strikes me that this might make it very hard for people to sign up (Recaptcha is the most popular) and I’d like an easier-to-use system now.

If you look at our campaigns now, you’ll see at the bottom a little box above the Submit button with this logo:

At the moment, let’s test this and see if it effectively blocks most spam.

If not, we will have to upgrade to a proper CAPTCHA.

We will need this bit of text translated — if we decide to stay with it:

Enter the number ___ here:

Thank you.

As well as this:

Headline news –

• We finally break the 100,000 mark in our mailing lists.
• Our Turkish list grew by 50% – now just under 2,000 addresses.
• The Spanish list grew by 10% and has moved up to third place.
• On Facebook, the number of people who like our page now finally exceeds the number who are members of our group. The number of members of UnionBook is bigger than each of these.
• We’re a month away from our LinkedIn group having more than 1,000 members – with no promotion at all from us.
• We’re also just shy of 1,000 volunteer correspondents.

Mailing lists

Total for all lists: 100,331 [97,538]

1. English: 73,474 [72,889]
2. French: 5,777 [5,701]
3. Spanish: 4,163 [3,857]
4. Italian: 3,873 [3,876]
5. Norwegian: 2,281 [2,424]
6. German: 2,292 [2,280]
7. Russian: 1,947 [1,738]
8. Turkish: 1,897 [1,280]
9. Dutch: 736 [736]
10. Chinese: 496 [488]
11. Polish: 306 [306]
12. Portuguese: 247 [247]
13. Japanese: 209 [ 209]
14. Swedish: 194 [196]
15. Farsi: 186 [190]
16. Finnish: 184 [184]
17. Danish: 156 [158]
18. Hebrew 157 [155]
19. Arabic: 156 [140]

And just below the radar:

Korean 93 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,227 [5,190]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 4,787 [4,666]
Members of LabourStart group: 4,762 [4,767]
Like LabourStart page (French): 213 [201]

Twitter followers –
English: 6,920 [6,719]

Union group on Flickr: 694 [693]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 951 [913]

Website

Correspondents: 994 [985]

Unique visits to the site this month : 509,378 [547,625]
Peak day: 21,706 [27.7.12]
Page views this month: 1,164,243 [1,206,879]

This is a bit delayed because I was on holiday from 13-20 July but now back at work and making progress on several issues.  Here are some highlights:

Conference: Our organizing committee continues to function; I have a conference call scheduled with them for next week.

Correspondents: The internal messaging system is now fixed; there had been a problem before that spam could be sent, though not via email, to all correspondents.

Campaigns:

• Closed: The Unite bus campaign in the UK was closed down following a victory. Another Unite campaign, in support of MMP workers, was closed down after three months.
• I added a key to the flags and languages here.
• We asked for and received the support of IndustriALL in the Kazakhstan campaign.
• New campaigns launched in support of sacked trade unionists in Peru and Turkey, and RMT cleaners in London.
• I fixed a bug in our special news pages for the UK, USA, Canada and Australia – we were not showing lists of the most current campaigns there, but we are now.
• Closed and archived campaigns – When trying to view certain closed campaigns, you couldn’t actually call them up – but I’ve now fixed this and you can see any campaign. I fixed the display of supporters for a campaign which has been closed. There’s now an accessible archive of closed campaigns.

Office: I’ve begun an intensive search for a London office.

Mailing list: We now have more than 100,000 addresses.

Book: I was approached by UCS, our book-selling partner in the USA, about doing a primer for trade unionists on use of the net.  I’ve agreed to do so.  Details to follow.

Internationalization:

• A problem was discovered with part of the display of the Turkish website; this is now nearly fixed.
• Work began on a Ukrainian edition – also nearly complete.

Newswires: Two more unions added the labour newswire to their sites.

Fundraising:

• The IUF has agreed to make a substantial donation to LabourStart.
• In addition, we’ve received several large donations from Canadian unions.
• We had 2,000 copies of our new fundraising brochure printed and I have begun mailing them out one by one to selected unions; the first target audience is Irish unions.

First of all, I am closing down the London bus drivers Olympics campaign today after one month online.

This campaign, launched with the support of the ITF and Unite, resulted in a big win for the workers. As Unite reported in a press release last week, “London bus workers have overwhelmingly voted to accept an offer of an Olympic award, meaning most workers will get £577 for the massive increase in workload over the Olympics.”

Bobby Morton, Acting National Passenger Officer for Unite, wrote: “On behalf of Unite the Union I wish to offer my heartfelt thanks to all of you who sent messages of support through Labourstart to the London Busworkers who achieved a great victory in the Olympic solidarity campaign. I am convinced that if there was a gold medal for solidarity you would all be recipients. Thanks also to the International Transport Workers’ Federation, ITF, for their unstinting support and efforts during this campaign.”

The ITF’s own statement issued last week is here.

Second, today we broke through a major barrier and now have 100,223 names on our mailing lists. Wow.

Headline news –

• 98,427 subscribers to our lists – we are only days away from reaching 100,000
• Growth of lists – especially English – is very slow, as partner unions fail to generate new supporters and we continue pushing campaigns at the same people month after month
• Twitter – over 500 new followers in the last two months
• Facebook page now only 101 ‘likes’ away from being bigger than Facebook group

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

Total for all lists: 97,538 [95,921]

English: 72,889 [72,726]
French: 5,701 [5,627]
Italian: 3,876 [3,883]
Spanish: 3,857 [3,775]
Norwegian: 2,424 [2,433]
German: 2,280 [2,195]
Russian: 1,738 [1,768]
Turkish: 1,280 [1,161]
Dutch: 736 [736]
Chinese: 488 [357]
Polish: 306 [306]
Portuguese: 247 [246]
Japanese: 209 [ 205]
Swedish: 196 [170]
Farsi 190 [188]
Finnish: 184 [184]
Danish: 158 [106]
Hebrew 155 [106]
Arabic: 140 [114]

And just below the radar:

Korean 93 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,190 [5,144]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,767 [4,775]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 4,666 [4,495]
Like LabourStart page (French): 201 [195]

Twitter followers –
English: 6,719 [6,414]

The following numbers will be updated next month, unless someone wants to do this now …
French: 110 [104]
Japanese: 25 [24]
Spanish: 20 [18]
Norwegian: 9 [8]
Italian: 8 [6]
German: 7 [8]
Turkish: 6 [5]
Portuguese: 4 [5]
Russian: 4 [5]
Dutch: 2 [2]

Union group on Flickr: 693 [687]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 913 [890]

Website

Correspondents: 985 [978]

Unique visits to the site this month : 547,625 [630,351]
Peak day: 23,659 – 13 June
Page views this month: 1,206,879 [1,271,874]

OK, so not weekly.  But I was in Copenhagen for three days last week attending the founding congress of IndustriALL global union, so that’s why I’m late with this roundup of some recent news.

Social Media: I began using SocialBro to increase our visibility on Twitter (see note below).  We’ve gone up from 6,414 to 6,642 followers since the beginning of this month – a growth of about 10 per day.  (We picked up 44 in one day thanks to a mention in one of our mailings.)  At this rate, we’ll reach 8,500 followers by the end of this year.  On Facebook, our Page – www.facebook.com/labourstart.org –  is rapidly approaching the size of our Group, as we had hoped.  The Page has 4,627 ‘likes’ while the Group has 4,771 ‘members’.  As you may recall, there are certain advantages to the Page, which we built long after the Group was launched.  At the very end of March last year, we started our Page (with zero followers) and we had 4,332 members of the LabourStart Group.  So you can see that all the growth is taking place in recruiting new fans or followers for the Page, which has been growing at the rate of about 10 per day, just like Twitter.

Campaigns: I posted something about campaigns that have zero followers earlier this month and had several interesting responses (see below).  Two new campaigns were launched this week, one for the ITF and one for IndustriALL; ten days ago we launched our Li Wangyang campaign which is now over 5,700 messages sent. Two campaigns are closing this weekend – Mexico and Colombia.  I fixed character encoding issues in the news iframe that appears on campaign pages.  I also fixed the script that shows supporters for a campaign so that it doesn’t update the overall numbers (this made it look like campaign numbers went up and down throughout the day). I fixed the mycampaigns script (which shows you which campaigns you have participated in) so it works with the new system and with different languages, again.  I’ve been having a discussion with our volunteer translators for Turkish; we now may have a solution that ensures timely translations of both campaigns and mailings, which is very important now that we have 1,244 Turkish addresses (up from 778 since the beginning of the year – a gain of 466, up more than 37%).

Mailing lists: There’s now a prominent link on our home page in English to sign up to the mailing list (this had disappeared for a while, though we have it for other languages) – and I removed all traces I could find of links to join any of our earlier mailing lists.  The total size of the lists is 98,356.

Writing: I had an article published in In These Times (about the launch of IndustriALL).  I’ll be doing another tomorrow for Solidarity.  I approached a number of other publications about writing on the same subject — Red Pepper, Progress and the Big Issue — but none of them responded.

Donations: The only big donation in the last couple of weeks came from LO Norway, which gave NOK 30,000 (£3,200).  We’ve raised over £9,000 since the beginning of April, with another £6,400 in our Canadian account.  (Derek can give a breakdown of which Canadian unions have made substantial donations or pledges.)  This is pretty much equal to what we had raised last year by this time.

Some of the things I’ve been working on for the last week:

Campaigns:

• Closed two campaigns (Kamal Abbas – Egypt, Abdolreza Ghanbari – Iran) without clear results yet.  Both cases continue.  The Ghanbari campaign set a new standard for us, and with over 17,000 messages sent it was our biggest campaign ever.  As Derek Blackadder points out in the comments, this means our next goal has to be 20,000.
• We also launched new campaigns this week in support of oil workers in Egypt and public sector workers in Algeria; both campaigns have gotten off to a slow start.
• We expect new campaigns to be launched shortly in support of workers in Korea, Kenya and possibly Turkey and Spain.
• The campaign counter is now fixed, though not yet fully automated (we’re unable to use ‘cron’ on the new server, for those of you who understand these things.)  I also tweaked a few more things the resulted from the move to our new campaigns server, such as ensuring that ‘ActNOW’ links that appear next to news stories point directly to the new site.  I fixed the campaigns script so you should no longer be able to choose ‘Select your country’ as your country (as many people have done).

Mailing lists: We are very close to 100,000 names.  When we cross this threshold, we’ll need to raise an additional £1,600 a year.  We’re going to attempt to grow the Danish and Swedish lists, and to find volunteer translators to help with mailings to these lists and campaigns.  (This is currently covered by Espen who does it in Norwegian, but it would be better to have versions in all three Scandinavian languages.)

ILO: We’ve gotten no further news from the ITUC and GUFs about the employer attempt to block discussion of workers’ rights at this year’s International Labour Conference. We have told all that we’re ready and willing to do an online campaign on a moment’s notice.

Writing: I had articles published this week in both Solidarity and the Morning Star about the case of US politician John Edwards.

Office: I’ve begun looking for an office for LabourStart as I will be moving house by late September and will no longer be able to work from home.  At the moment we’re budgetting about £600 per month (£7,200 a year), which will either get us a very small office or possibly a studio apartment.

Intern: I looked into what it would cost to hire an intern at the London Living Wage; I think this and an office are the next two steps toward professionalizing LabourStart even more and expanding our capacity.  At £8.30 per hour, and calculating a 35 hour week, that would be an additional £15,100 per year we’d need to raise.

Donations: We received £1,100 in the last week from two British unions (CWU – £1,000; Napo – £100), £126 from the OECTA in Canada and a number of individual donors (£222).