Inside LabourStart

• We’re around 500 people short of our goal of 10,000 supporters for this campaign – we’ll do another push this afternoon.
• A prominent Facebook ‘like’ button now appears on top of every campaign page.  Please click on it.
• Later today, I have a phone call scheduled with the AFL-CIO international department to discuss a major campaign we may need to do in defense of Georgian trade unions.
• The review (overhaul) of our website that was due to appear in .net magazine did not appear yesterday – but the editor has assured me that it will appear in next month’s issue and apologized.
• Now we have a correct link on every language page in LabourStart that allows you to sign up to our list in that specific language.
• We’ve fixed the Turkish title of our conference and added a registration page in Turkish to the site.
• I’ve completed the task of writing individual, personalized messages to every national trade union center within 1,000 km of Istanbul (that’s 20 countries).
• We now have an online page that shows who has registered for our conference – email me if you’d like to see it and I’ll send you the URL.

The winning video in this year’s Labour Video of the Year competition is this one.  There were 1,168 votes cast – much lower than we had last year.  Of those, 280 agreed to be on LabourStart’s mailing list and had not been on our list before.

What a boring title for a great thing!  I’ve just sent out a mailing to the 5,108 addresses on our English language list whose email addresses end with “.uk”.  That doesn’t cover everyone in the UK, but it’s a lot of people.  The mailing promotes two public meetings in London and Liverpool that the Egyptian trade union leader Kamal Abbas is speaking at later this month.  This means we can do the same for our Canadian, Australian and other lists in future.  This is a capacity we never really had before.

Here are the totals with the last month in brackets:
—
Mailing lists (with over 100 members)
English: 56.584 [56,950]
Norwegian: 2,759 [2,760]
French: 2,481 [2,462]
Spanish: 1,532 [1,614]
German: 839 [854]
Turkish: 689
Italian: 526
Russian: 493
Polish: 302
Portuguese: 252
Chinese: 243
Dutch: 234
Finnish: 178

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Social networks
UnionBook 2.0 – members: 3,593 [3,503]
Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,369 [4,332]
Like LabourStart.org page 962 [120]
Twitter – followers: 3,469 [3,269]
Union group on Flickr: 637 [635]
LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 334 [318]
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Website
Correspondents: 866 [865]
Unique visits to the site this month: 532,236 [509,194]
Page views this month: 1,245,761 [1,291,153]
Popular language home pages (last month in brackets):
* English 49,471 [45,959]
Our web host (1&1 Internet) no longer provides details beyond the 30 most popular pages, and none of the other language pages are in this category.

• Mailing lists: I continue the process of migrating our mailing lists over to MailChimp – all languages except for the Scandinavian ones and French are currently in progress. Today I set up mailing list sign-up forms which are links on our pages in Spanish, Turkish, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Arabic, Finnish, Russian, Chinese and Polish. The only languages that remain to do are the ones with much smaller lists – Farsi, Vietnamese, Bulgarian, Czech, Creole, Greek, Esperanto, Indonesian, Georgian and Hebrew. Translators will need some help in using MailChimp and I will attend to that before we do our next mailing.
• Campaigns: We expect to launch the Bahrain campaign later today.  I had a long discussion last night with the IMF about doing some large scale campaigns in the near future. The Our Campaigns page (see link in the upper right corner) now goes back to early 2007.  We will need to find summaries of what happened – especially in cases where we won.

I continue doing the migration of most of our short and inactive lists to MailChimp – but am holding off on the biggest (Norwegian, French) until I have the consent of the editors.  Each day I migrate 5 or 6 languages over.

I’ve raised the question with the ITUC and some of the GUFs that we need a popular campaign – one that will get tens of thousands of supporters – in order to grow our list in the way that groups like 38degrees and Avaaz do.  Our campaigns tend to focus on little-known industrial disputes and often the first time anywhere has ever heard of these is when we campaign on them.  From time to time, we should take on more popular causes — and the growth of our mailing lists will mean that the smaller campaigns will benefit enormously.

I’ve posted a page where I intend to document all the campaigns we’ve done over the years — to see who has been asking us (recently, mostly GUFs), which countries are affected, how many people sign up, who the target was, and what the result on the ground was.  I’d personally find this useful when I give talks or write articles about online campaigning, but it will also more generally give us a sense of what we’ve been doing and where we should be going.

I’m in negotiations with an exiled Iraqi trade unionist in the USA — USLAW was circulating an appeal to people to help him out.  I think we’ll pay him something to translate some of our stuff (e.g., campaigns, mailings) into Arabic.

I’ve taken a number of important steps to make our site more secure, which I won’t be publishing here for obvious reasons.  Suffice it to say that the Berkman Center report on how human rights organizations are vulnerable to cyber-attack has influenced me and I had a fairly long to-do list of things which have all now been implemented.  I’m happy to discuss this with any of you by email.

Our Facebook page went from 0 to 117 likes in the first 24 hours online.

Yesterday’s mass mailing focussed on the IUF’s victory in Indonesia against Nestle – driving a substantial amount of traffic to the IUF website as a result.

The number of submissions to the Labour Video of the Year has stalled.  Only 2 new submissions came in as a result of the mass mailing.

17 hours after our mass mailing went out and only 10% of the list has opened the message.  MailChimp claims that it’s normal for 20-30% to do so.  Our best result in the last month in a mailing to the English list was to get 18% to open.  Any ideas on how we can improve the open rate?  (It’s higher for mailings to our correspondents – as many as 24% will open a mailing.  Still, that means 3 out of 4 correspondents don’t open their emails from us.)

Back at my desk after being away for more than a week … here are some updates:

• There’s now a shortcut to our news about Wisconsin – just go to www.labourstart.org/wisconsin .  I’ve also fixed the page the displays state/provincial news; it had been showing a link to our old mailing lists.
• I’ve written to the CTUWS to ask if they want us to do a campaign opposing the Egyptian government’s plan to ban strikes.
• I spoke last week at the New Orleans conference of the UALE – on a panel on the subject of global solidarity.  My lecture notes are here.  The conference was an opportunity to do some networking and I learned a lot about Wisconsin and other issues that concern the labour movement in the US.
• We’re up to 55 people attending (or possibly attending) our conference in November.
• MailChimp suspended our account last week because one person on one of our lists claimed he never signed up.  I proved to them today that he had, so I hope that later today we will be able to resume mailings.