Inside LabourStart

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.

We’ve now done five mailings using MailChimp – 2 to our correspondents and 3 to our English language list.  I’ve only gotten one bit of feedback – someone who noticed and liked the improvement.  No complaints from anyone.

I’m in discussions with Mahesh about getting the Hindi and Bengali editions of LabourStart off the ground – hopefully soon.

I’ve been working on my presentation for the debate on Monday at Oxford on activism vs slacktivism, as well as Thursday’s talk in New Orleans at the UALE conference.

We’ve had a slow flow of nominations for the Labour Video of the Year competition – only 16 nominated so far.  I’ve sent out a reminder to our lists.

We’re also just beginning to collect pre-registrations for our global solidarity conference in Istanbul using Facebook.  At the moment we have 10 saying yes and 12 saying maybe,  for a total of 22.  I expect this to increase in the next few days as we’ve not only mentioned it in our mailings, but have just sent it out to members of all our causes on Facebook.

The first mass mailing we ever did with Mail Chimp went out 4 hours ago and one result is that we have just under 1,000 messages sent to the Chilean government — coming in at the rate of about 240 per hour.  This is considerably faster than what we were able to achieve in the past.  But it was expected.

A few years ago I wrote about the ‘velocity’ of campaigns and noted that when I demonstrated this in Canada, it took us 40 hours to get from 1 message to 1,000 sent.  Today it takes one-tenth that amount of time – only four hours.

But also interesting to note another number that is persistent over the last four hours.  About 20% of those who open their email — even if only to glance at it — then go on to support the LabourStart campaign we’re promoting.  That’s an extraordinarily high number.  At the moment, we’re talking about 970 people out of 4,550.  Imagine if all 60,000 people were to open their email message — it would mean 12,000 messages sent to the Chilean government, our largest campaign by far.

This is the first campaign we’re promoting using MailChimp and we’ll see if the vastly increased speed of delivery as well as improved graphics capability leads to better results.  In the first 20 minutes, all the messages were delivered to our list, 915 people opened and read them, 168 of whom supported the campaign (an astonishing 18% response rate!).  In addition to this campaign, we’re promoting BananaLink’s campaign in support of women plantation workers, telling people to save the date for our conference, and promoting our book of the month.

I’m experimenting with MailChimp for doing our larger mailings (the English language ones).

We need a system to mail out frequently and to deliver our messages within minutes and this might be the one for us.

The first mailing to test capacity was yesterday’s to our correspondents list.

Today we’ll mail something to the entire English list.

Work has begun on promoting our upcoming 2nd annual Global Solidarity Conference, to be held in Istanbul on 18-20 November 2011.

Following my meetings last week in Turkey we have set the date and venue (the headquarters of the oil workers’ union Petrol-Is).

This has now been added as an event on UnionBook and Facebook, posted as a tweet by myself and by LabourStart, posted to the wall of LabourStart’s Facebook group, mailed out as a save-the-date mailing to our correspondents, and mentioned to unions in other countries in the region (Georgia, Egypt, etc.).

Here are the totals with the changes since the end of last month in brackets:

Mailing lists – subscribers: 76,177 [+3,774]
LabourStart’s English language mailing list: 63,403 60,240 [+3,163]

Unique visits to the site this month: 466,615 540,582 (-73,967)
Page views this month: 1,318,172 (-209,368)

Popular language home pages (last month in brackets):

* English 41,236 (44,183)
* French 5,707 (5,084)
* Norwegian 5,306 (5,033)
* Finnish 2,281 (2,121)
* Polish 1,670 (2,016)
* Russian 1,340 (1,851)
* Dutch 1,232 (1,523)

UnionBook 2.0 – members: 3,379 [+285]
Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 4,313 [+163]
Twitter – followers: 3,114 [+202]
Correspondents: 855 [+11]
Union group on Flickr: 617 [+22]
LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 300 [+24]

Some highlights from the mailing lists — the other large groups are:

Norwegian 2,753 [+10]
French 2,452 [+67]
Spanish 1,591 [+303]
German 854 [+8]
Turkish 694 [+179]
Italian 538 [+6]
Russian 498 [+3]
Polish 303 [no change]
Portuguese 253 [+11]
Chinese 245 [+1]
Dutch 236 [no change]
Swedish 228 [+3]

Over 5,000 messages were sent out in response to our campaign appeals in the last 48 hours – this is a new record for us.

Many of these were new people and as a result, our mailing lists saw significant growth this week.

The net gain to all our lists in the last 17 days was over 1,650 subscribers – with major gains for English (1,275 new subscribers), Spanish (165 new subscribers), and Turkish (150 new subscribers).

Here are the totals with the changes since the end of last month in brackets:

Mailing lists – subscribers: 72,403 [+1,620]
LabourStart’s English language mailing list: 60,240  [+1,322]

Unique visits to the site this month: 540,582 (-11,153)
Page views this month: 1,527,540 (-409,670)

Popular language home pages (last month in brackets):

* English 44,183 (41,748)
* French 5,084 (4,676)
* Norwegian 5,033 (6,768)
* Finnish 2,121 (2,069)
* Russian 1,851 (1,605)
* Polish 2,016 (1.833)
* Dutch 1,523 (1,280)

UnionBook 2.0 – members: 3,094  [+289]
Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 4,150  [+220]
Twitter – followers: 2,912 2,790 [+122]
Correspondents: 844 [+16]
Union group on Flickr: 595 [+2]
LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 276 [+39]

Some highlights from the mailing lists — the other large groups are:

Norwegian 2,743  [+19]
French 2,385 [+37]
Spanish 1,288  [+21]
German 846 [+6]
Italian 532  [+3]
Turkish 515  [+25]
Russian 495 [+9]
Polish 303 [+1]
Chinese 244 [+1]
Portuguese 242 [+4]
Dutch 236 [+3]
Swedish 225 [-2]
Danish 160 [+1]

Here are the totals with the changes since the end of last month in brackets:

Mailing lists – subscribers: 70,783 [+111]
LabourStart’s English language mailing list: 58,918 [-86]

N.B. As I was away from 12.12 through 31.12, the mailing lists have not been updated with participants from our most recent campaigns, nor those who voted in the Labour Photo of the Year competition. These additional numbers will be reflected at the end of January in next month’s report.

Unique visits to the site this month: 551,735 (-1,415)
Page views this month: 1,937,210 (+481,370)

Popular language home pages (last month in brackets):

* English 41,748 (47,870)
* Norwegian 6,768 (6,959)
* French 4,676 (4,583)
* Finnish 2,069 (2,456)
* Russian 1,605 (2,125)
* Polish 1.833 (1,838)
* Dutch 1,280 (1,414)
* Italian 843 (1,122)

UnionBook 2.0 – members: 2,805 [+322]
Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 3,930 [+43]
Twitter – followers: 2,790 [+103]
Correspondents: 828 [+3]
Union group on Flickr: 593 [+1]
LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 237 [no change]

Some highlights from the mailing lists — the other large groups are:

Norwegian 2,724 [-7]
French 2,348 [-1]
Spanish 1,267 [-1]
German 840 [+36]
Italian 529 [-2]
Russian 486 [no change]
Turkish 490 [+5]
Polish 302 [no change]
Portuguese 238 [no change]
Chinese 243 [no change]
Dutch 233 [+1]
Swedish 227 [-1]
Danish 159 [no change]