Inside LabourStart

Headline news –

• Turkish list grows by nearly 50% following the campaign in support of aviation workers union Hava-Is
• All mailing lists now just a month away from breaking through the 100,000 barrier (only 2,462 to go)
• Social networks – FB page growing (up 134), group stagnating; 215 more Twitter followers in English; another 144 join UnionBook; LinkedIn group to reach 1,000 by mid-summer – with no effort by us …
• We are a month or two away from having 1,000 correspondents

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

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

English: 72,726 [71,816]
French: 5,627 [5,387]
Italian: 3,883 [3,877]
Spanish: 3,775 [3,707]
Norwegian: 2,424 [2,433]
German: 2,195 [2,160]
Russian: 1,768 [1,767]
Turkish: 1,161 [801]
Dutch: 736 [734]
Chinese: 357 [357]
Polish: 306 [305]
Portuguese: 246 [246]
Japanese: 205 [ 205]
Farsi 188 [193]
Finnish: 184 [184]
Swedish: 170 [171]
Arabic: 114 [114]
Hebrew 106 [100]
Danish: 106 [106]

And just below the radar:

Korean 93 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,144 [5,100]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,775 [4,766]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 4,495 [4,361]
Like LabourStart page (French): 195 [180]

Twitter followers –
English: 6,414 [6,199]

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: 687 [682]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 890 [842]

Website

Correspondents: 978 [972] – 4 pending

Unique visits to the site this month : 630,351 [590,196]
Peak day: 24,828 – 21.5.12
Page views this month: 1,271,874 [1,289,430]

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

Total for all lists: 95,921 [95,403]

English: 71,816 [71,466]
French: 5,387 [5,070]
Italian: 3,877 [3,850]
Spanish: 3,707 [3,674]
Norwegian: 2,433 [2,430]
German: 2,160 [2,097]
Russian: 1,767 [1,761]
Turkish: 801 [796]
Dutch: 734 [725]
Chinese: 357 [344]
Polish: 305 [305]
Portuguese: 246 [246]
Japanese:205 [ 206]
Finnish: 184 [184]
Farsi 193 [173]
Swedish: 171 [173]
Arabic: 114 [113]
Danish: 106 [107]
Hebrew 100 [99]

And just below the radar:

Korean 93 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,100 [5,050]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,766 [4,721]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 4,361 [4,217]
Like LabourStart page (French): 180 [146]

Twitter followers –
English: 6,199 [6,019]
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: 682 [680]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 842 [792]

Website

Correspondents: 972 [966] – 7 pending

Unique visits to the site this month : 590,196 [677,769]
Peak day: 25,708 – 17.4.12
Page views this month: 1,289,430 [1,521,870]

Global union federations: I spent two days this week at the IUF and discussed, among other things, my participation in their Congress in May.  The IMF has asked us to do a new campaign on Kosovo/Serbia, which we’ll launch today.  The new merged GUFs – IMF, ICEM and ITGLWF, have invited me to attend the founding congress of the new federation, called IndustriALL in Copenhagen in June.  I contacted UNI about the Netherlands cleaners campaign which is now two months old; they want us to continue it for another month. PSI is looking into whether we need to do a Paraguay campaign together. The ITF‘s Auckland campaign was closed – another victory.  See below for how our list reacted to the news.

Other campaigns: I submitted a short article to the left-wing German weekly newspaper Jungle World which, when published, should give a boost to the Matteo Parlati campaign.    I made some small changes to the mycampaigns.cgi script so that it should work better in French and Norwegian (fixed the character encoding of the page).  We have been approached by unions in Canada and South Africa about launching new campaigns.  A discussion is taking place among Turkish unions about another possible campaign there, this time targetting an Apple supplier (they’re not only in China).

Mailing list: I gave Mac Urata access (and instructions) so he can send mailings out in Japanese.  The lists are rapidly approaching 100,000 members; when we cross that threshhold we will be paying another amount each month.

Ukrainian version of LabourStart: Masha is sorting out a translation of the interface and we have a large group of volunteer correspondents in Ukraine ready to go.

Regular tasks: Did the monthly review of LabourStart stats (see below).  Backed up the website, mailing lists and databases, as I do every week.

Here are the totals with the last month in brackets:

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

Total for all lists: 95,403

English: 71,466 [68,656]
French: 5,070 [4,046]
Italian: 3,850 [3,522]
Spanish: 3,674 [3,389]
Norwegian: 2,430 [2,373]
German: 2,097 [2,035]
Russian: 1,761 [1,630]
Turkish: 796 [788]
Dutch: 725 [686]
Chinese: 344 [304]
Polish: 305 [305]
Portuguese: 246 [246]
Japanese: 206 [156]
Finnish: 184 [184]
Farsi 173 [93]
Swedish: 173 [178]
Arabic: 113 [100]
Danish: 107 [107]

And just below the radar:

Hebrew 99 [96]
Korean 93 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,050 [4,981]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,721 [4,719]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 4,217 [3,953]
Like LabourStart page (French): 146 [137]

Twitter followers –
English: 6,019 [5,782]
French: 104 [101]
Japanese: 24 [15]
Spanish: 18 [14]
German: 8 [5]
Norwegian: 8 [5]
Italian: 6 [5]
Portuguese: 5 [4]
Russian: 5 [3]
Turkish: 5 [3]
Dutch: 2 [1]

Union group on Flickr: 680 [676]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 792 [710]

Website

Correspondents: 966 [957]

Unique visits to the site this month : 677,769 [609,164]
Peak day: 26,836 – 9.3.12
Page views this month: 1,521,870 [1,381,128]

As I was travelling in the USA for part of this time, I have an excuse. Anyway, here are some of the things I’ve been up to these past 3 weeks.

Campaigns: I’ve closed a number of those that reached the 3 month limit, and launched three others. Our biggest campaign ever was launched during this period. I began work on a new system to allow others – senior correspondents, for example – to launch campaigns while I am travelling. I also did a full review of the last two campaigns and what’s been translated and what not; as a result, we now have campaigns and mailings done for Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish and Hebrew. I’m still waiting for responses from our translators for Korean, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish and Vietnamese. Ideally, all campaigns will appear in 18 languages, and we’ll mail to 18 lists.  As a result of these campaigns, we now have over 93,000 names on our mailing lists.

Social media: I dealt with problems that arose from repeated attacks on our Twitter account (now solved). UnionBook grew to more than 5,000 members for the first time.

Partners: I set up a meeting at the ITUC, to take place in Brussels next week. I continued fundraising efforts with GUFs and British unions. So far this year, nine GUFs have given money and seven British unions have either pledged or donated.

Conference 2012: Work continues in Sydney; our organizing committee there is growing and meeting regularly and we’re sharing information on Basecamp.

Some headlines:

• Six of the mailing lists grew quite quickly – the Dutch list, for example, nearly tripled in size.  Lists that grew by 100 or more include the English (+1,242), German (+501), Italian (+476), Dutch (+449), Spanish (+338),  and French (+265).  The net gain on the non-English lists far exceeds the growth of the English list.  The total size of all the lists now exceeds 90,000.
• UnionBook picked up another 106 members while the LabourStart group on Facebook grew by only 8.  This means that UnionBook has 262 more members than our Facebook group.
• Our Facebook page continues to pick up ‘likes’ – we gained 338 new ones in February, a growth of nearly 10%.  (Last month we picked up only 150, so it more than doubled.)
• Our presence on Twitter, despite spam attacks, continues to grow quite dramatically: in recent months the English feed picked up 200 new followers each month.  In February, we picked up double that number – 399 new followers.  And our other Twitter feeds are beginning to slowly pick up followers.
• The group on LinkedIn continues to grow every day.  It was previously growing at the rate of 10% a month, but this last month it grew by considerably more than that and now exceeds 700.

Here are the totals with the last month (January 2012) in brackets:

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

English: 68,656 [67,414]
French: 4,046 [3,781]
Italian: 3,522 [3,076]
Spanish: 3,389 [3,051]
Norwegian: 2,373 [2,357]
German: 2,035 [1,534]
Russian: 1,630 [1,600]
Turkish: 788 [787]
Dutch: 686 [237]
Polish: 305 [304]
Chinese: 304 [276]
Portuguese: 246 [245]
Finnish: 184 [183]
Swedish: 178 [180]
Japanese: 156 [137]
Danish: 107 [107]
Arabic 100 [97]

And just below the radar:

Hebrew 96 [96]
Korean 93 [93]
Farsi 93 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 4,981 [4,875]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,719 [4,711]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 3,953 [3,615]
Like LabourStart page (French): 137 [108]

Twitter followers –
English: 5,782 [5,383]
French: 101 [90]
Japanese: 15 [15]
Spanish: 14 [0]
Norwegian: 5 [0]
Italian: 5 [0]
German: 5 [1]
Portuguese: 4 [0]
Russian: 3 [0]
Turkish: 3[0]
Dutch: 1 [0]

Union group on Flickr: 676 [674]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 710 [607]

Website
Correspondents: 957 [948]
Unique visits to the site this month : 609,164 [638,240] – n.b., only counting first 28 days of February
Peak day: 27,716 – 21.2.12
Page views this month: 1,319,332 [1,301,326]

Some odds and ends – things that have kept me busy these last few days …

Twitter: We now have Canadian English and French feeds (thanks to Derek) and they’re quite popular. Today we mailed to over 9,000 Canadians on our list in the hope of making them even better known.  At the moment, the English feed has 364 followers; the French one has 20.

App: As I reported below, we’re pretty much ready to launch the iPad version and will probably do this in the next day or two.  It will, however, take Apple a couple of weeks to approve this and make it available in the App Store. Versions will quickly follow for other platforms including the iPhone, Android, etc, and other languages.

Campaigns: We discovered that there was a bug in our software that allowed people to sign up twice from the same email address – this has now been fixed.  This may also help speed up the system — and we’ll be making several other small tweaks to the code to make it work faster and more efficiently.  We launched a new campaign on Peru; publicity and translations begin today. A new campaign, just over the horizon, deals with Italy.  We have several more in the pipeline.  I’ve followed up about three campaigns that this week have reached the two-month mark (Turkey, Kazakhstan and Italy), asking our partners if they should be closed or if we can somehow reawaken interest in them.  We now have a way to show supporters which campaigns they’ve signed up to and which ones they’ve missed – this is now highlighted in the email they receive when they send off a campaign message and will be included elsewhere in our system.  The goal is to get our supporters to sign up to even more campaigns. I’ve given our Korean translator direct access to input campaigns, and have asked for a translation of the news as well.  There have been a couple of small tweaks to the campaign design – there is now a required field for the photo (and no longer a need to code in the HTML to display it); also, it’s now easier to input partner information as the HTML is now displayed.

News: While we set up the Dutch platform successfully, the Norwegian one caused problems.  I’ve now made the changes which I think will allow our Norwegian correspondents to see an interface in their language – we’ll test this tomorrow.  This already works in English, Russian and French.

Fundraising: I’ve been doing a lot of work on global and British unions; we’ve gotten some good commitments to donations this year but have a lot more work to do.  I’ll give a full report later on.

Survey: We completed the second annual survey of trade union use of the net and began publicity of the results.  I’ll be making the full survey results public later this week.  This was our largest and most successful survey ever, and we learned a lot.   We also added several hundred new people to our mailing list.

Conference 2012: An organizing committee has been formed in Sydney and they are due to meet soon. We are all using Basecamp to share a calendar, to-do lists, messages and documents (writeboards).  All the members of the committee as well as Derek and myself have logged in and used the system.

Some headlines:

1. Five of the top six mailing lists have grown very well in the last month – especially Italian, Spanish and Russian which grew by a combined total of almost 2,500.
2. All the other mailing lists have pretty much stagnated, though we have hopes for a big growth of the Dutch list this month.
3. UnionBook and the LabourStart page on Facebook continue to grow, albeit slowly. The former has picked up another 85 members while the latter has grown by over 150 new people.
4. We’re expanding our presence on Twitter, with new Japanese and German feeds already introduced and many more on the way. The English one is growing at the rate of about 200 new followers per month.
5. There’s been a huge boost — expected post-Christmas — in the number of unique visitors to the site. We’re now looking at something like 640,000 unique visitors per month.
6. The LinkedIn group – with no promotion whatsoever – continues to grow at the rate of 10% per month, and now has over 600 members.

Here are the totals with the last month (January 2012) in brackets (large gains – 100+ – in bold face):

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

English: 67,414 [66,576]
French: 3,781 [3,582]
Italian: 3,076 [2,420]
Spanish: 3,051 [2,115]
Norwegian: 2,357 [2,333]
Russian: 1,600 [712]
German: 1,534 [1,516]
Turkish: 787 [778]
Polish: 304 [304]
Chinese: 276 [276]
Portuguese: 245 [245]
Dutch: 237 [236]
Finnish: 183 [183]
Swedish: 180 [182]
Japanese: 137 [137]
Danish: 107 [107]

And just below the radar:

Arabic 97 [89]
Hebrew 96 [96]
Korean 93 [93]
Farsi 93 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook 2.0 – members: 4,875 [4,790]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,711 [4,714]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 3,615 [3,462]
Like LabourStart page (French): 108 [96]

Twitter followers –
English: 5,383 [5,180]
French: 90 [85]
Japanese: 15 [0]
German: 1 [0]

Union group on Flickr: 674 [673]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 607 [551]

Website

Correspondents: 948 [940]

Unique visits to the site this month : 638,240 [597,481]
Peak day: 26,170 – 27.1.12
Page views this month: 1,301,326 [1,370,129 ]

Headline news –
1 The Italian mailing list grew five-fold from 560 to 2,420, becoming our third largest list overnight – due to the FIAT campaign.
2 The Russian list also grew by some 15% in one month due to our Kazakhstan campaign.
3 For the first time ever, UnionBook has more members than our group on Facebook – which has declined in membership for the first time.
4 Our followers on Twitter outnumber both of these, and the number has now exceeded 5,000 for the first time.
5 Our relatively inactive group on LinkedIn continues to grow at the rate of 10% per month.
6 At the current rate of growth (5 new correspondents per month), we won’t reach 1,000 correspondents before the end of 2012 – so we’ll want to do a cull to remove inactive correspondents sooner than that.
7 Traffic to the site remained quite high considering that it was December. There were just under 600,000 unique visitors. And this in spite of the fact that the last third of the month would have seen many (or most) of our readers on vacation.

Here are the totals with the last month (December 2011) in brackets (large gains – 100+ – in bold face):

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

English: 66,576 [66,226]
French: 3,582 [3,333]
Italian: 2,420 [560]
Norwegian: 2,333 [2,337]
Spanish: 2,115 [2,082]
German: 1,516 [1,485]
Turkish: 778 [758]
Russian: 712 [617]
Polish: 304 [304]
Chinese: 276 [249]
Portuguese: 245 [245]
Dutch: 236 [235]
Finnish: 183 [182]
Swedish: 182 [182]
Japanese: 137 [133]
Danish: 107 [112]

And just below the radar:

Hebrew 96 [97]
Korean 93 [93]
Farsi 93 [93]
Arabic 89 [84]

Social networks

UnionBook 2.0 – members: 4,790 [4,706]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,714 [4,738]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 3,462 [3,192]
Like LabourStart page (French): 96 [89]

Twitter –
English – followers: 5,180 [4,964]
French – followers: 85 [82]

Union group on Flickr: 673 [661]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 551 [503]

Website

Correspondents: 940 [935]

Unique visits to the site this month : 597,481 [576,905]
Peak day: 23,597 – 17.12.11
Page views this month: 1,370,129 [1,371,687]

There are two problems with MailChimp, our email provider.

The first is cost – we’re paying £3,700 a year for this. I think we might be able to find something equally good for less money.

The second – and more important – is that MailChimp, unlike previous tools we have tried (e.g., PHPlist) doesn’t allow multiple admins. So if I want to give a language editor the ability to post messages to their list, they all share the same user ID and password as I do.

This is idiotic.

It means that every time we do a mailing, I have to collect the translations from each one, format and edit them myself. This is particularly difficult for the non-Latin based languages which I do not read, such as Arabic and Japanese. We need a system which can do this, which is cheaper, and which works otherwise just as well. I’m looking into this now.