Inside LabourStart

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.

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

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

English: 66,226 [65,425]
French: 3,333 [3,291]
Norwegian: 2,337 [2,342]
Spanish: 2,082 [2,051]
German: 1,485 [1,058]
Turkish: 758 [708]
Russian: 617 [609]
Italian: 560 [552]
Polish: 304 [303]
Chinese: 249 [249]
Portuguese: 245 [244]
Dutch: 235 [235]
Swedish: 182 [188]
Finnish: 182 [181]
Japanese: 133 [124]
Danish: 112 [115]

And just below the radar:

Hebrew 97
Korean 93
Farsi 93
Arabic 84

Social networks

UnionBook 2.0 – members: 4,706 [4,599]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,738 [4,703]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 3,192 [2,855]
Like LabourStart page (French): 89 [83]

Twitter –
English – followers: 4,964 [4,699]
French – followers: 82 [80]

Union group on Flickr: 661 [658]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 503 [485]

Website

Correspondents: 935 [930]

Unique visits to the site this month : 576,905 [573,525]
Peak day: 25,482 – 2.11.11
Page views this month: 1,371,687 [1,402,386]

Some highlights:

* Nearly all the mailing lists are growing – some quite dramatically (the German and Spanish lists, for example, over the last couple of months).
* As for social networks, there’s now a virtual tie between the number of users of UnionBook, the members of LabourStart’s Facebook group, and our followers on Twitter. At the moment, the Facebook group is the largest – by 4 people. But it suffered a net loss in members this month, while UnionBook picked up about 100 new ones.  My guess is the UnionBook or Twitter will lead next month.
* We continue to pick up several members each week for our LinkedIn group, which we barely use and never promote. We’re now up to just under 500 members. If any of you are very active users of LinkedIn and are keen to take charge of this, let me know.
* At our current rate of growth, we’ll be at 1,000 LabourStart correspondents by the end of February. At that point – or sooner – we might want to begin to purge the list of inactive ones.
* There was a massive increase in traffic to the site in October – page views alone were up about 30% compared to September. And on a peak day, we’re now getting over 24,000 unique visitors.

Here are the totals with the last month in brackets (large gains are in bold face):

Mailing lists (with over 100 members)

English: 65,425 [65,139]
French: 3,291 [3,199]
Norwegian: 2,342 [2,318]
Spanish: 2,051 [2,021]
German: 1,058 [908]
Turkish: 708 [700]
Russian: 609 [597]
Italian: 552 [539]
Polish: 303 [302]
Portuguese: 244 [252]
Chinese: 249 [249]
Dutch: 235 [231]
Swedish: 188 [190]
Japanese: 124
Finnish: 181 [179]
Danish: 115 [117]

Social networks

UnionBook 2.0 – members: 4,599 [4,498]
Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,703 [4,714]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 2,855 [2,705]
Like LabourStart page (French): 83 [79]
Twitter –
English – followers: 4,699 [4,541]
French – followers: 80 [78]
Union group on Flickr: 658 [652]
LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 485 [464]

Website

Correspondents: 930 [916]
Unique visits to the site this month : 573,525 [503,250]
Peak day: 24,154 – 18.10.11
Page views this month: 1,402,386 [1,120,845]

Thanks to the help of Mac Urata at the ITF, we finally have campaigns – and a 122-strong mailing list – in Japanese.

We will begin outreach this week to Japanese trade unionists.

I don’t have to tell you all how important this is and how much we appreciate Mac’s help.

It’s been a busy day …

• All recent supporters of our campaigns have now been added to our mailing lists on MailChimp – we’re seeing signficant growth for the German list, which indicates that our campaigns are now being promoted there by at least one union.
• The mass mailing regarding our Egypt campaign has gone out for translation and we’ve gotten translations back already in at least two languages.
• I’ve done further work on our Wikipedia entry, including trying to create an entry for UnionBook but am encountering some resistance there.
• I’ve written to comrades in Georgia about getting a Georgian language version of our campaigns up – particularly the current Georgian one.  Am awaiting their reply.
• Mac Urata at the ITF has agreed to help us get a Japanese version of the campaigns up and running.
• On UnionBook, I’ve managed to sort comments in Groups in reverse date order – something which people have asked for.
• I’ve begun the process of creating a secure directory (URLs would begin with https://) on our site – this is needed if we use Facebook for some pages, which has been done for our French version.
• It’s been suggested that we could get an article about LabourStart published in a left-wing Esperanto magazine; I’ve asked one of our correspondents who speaks the language to take care of this.
• Using a service called Conduit Mobile I’ve been doing further work on a small, simple UnionBook app for mobile devices.
• I did extensive work on our newswires today, including getting the French RSS feed to work properly, reviewing the ActNOW RSS feed in French and Norwegian (now fixed), the Health and Safety wire in French (seems OK), and tweaking our new French language newswire for North Africa.  In addition I completed work on migrating all the regional newswires over to our new database – finally.

• We’ve resumed the book of the month. The next mass mailing will feature it. Today, social media was used to publicize. This month, it’s Joe Hill.
• ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow has agreed to open our conference with a video message. She can’t be there, but this is the next best thing. We hope to get the message in time to allow us to subtitle it in Turkish (and Arabic?)
• Our first app for a smartphone is nearly ready (within 24 hours). If you have a Nokia smartphone, let me know. We have submitted something to their app store. (The iOS and Adroid versions are in the works.)
• We’ve sent a long message to PSI about their Korea campaign with suggestions about how to revive it after two months online. Some 3,000 of the 3,200 messages were sent in the first week.
• At the request of our Russian comrades, we’ve now closed down the Valentin Urusov campaign. We may need to revive it later this year, as he is still in jail.
• We will almost certainly have a campaign focussed on India next week (in support of Suzuki workers).  We’re waiting for final approval from the IMF.
• Work on the upcoming Global Solidarity Conference is going well, if a bit behind the scenes at the moment. I have weekly phone conferences with our staffer in Istanbul, Eyup. This Monday, we’ll begin the process of approving who gets subsidies. I have made special efforts in the last week to encourage participation from Jordan, Palestine, Iraq and Georgia.
• We have a much more prominent signup form on our home page now for our mailing list (in English only at the moment). This will be an important feature of our site redesign, which will begin probably just after our conference ends.
• We have a new newswire for Fiji – created at the request of the Australian unions, who are using it.
• I’ve upgraded our Facebook group – not sure exactly what that means, but people now need to be approved to join and there’s a lot more activity there than before.
• UnionBook has reverted to much more staid colors after a pink and purple phase. No one seems to have noticed …

Here are the totals with the last month in brackets: