Inside LabourStart

There’s been a need to resume daily — or near daily — mass mailings.  Yesterday, we needed to announce the launch of RadioLabour.net — something we’d already done for our UnionBook members. Today, the IUF has asked us to help promote a solidarity campaign in support of striking workers in South Africa (at AB Miller).  Tomorrow, we may well do a mailing to report on the end of another dispute there (Sun International).  These mailings are being kept deliberately brief.  So far, no complaints.

I’ve just done our first mailing to the English language LabourStart list — more than 50,000 addresses.  It should take anywhere from 10 to 17 hours to complete.  (And yes, I am looking into ways to speed that up.)  This is the first real test to see how well our new server (DirectNIC in the USA) and software (PHPlist) stand up under pressure.  There’s no real way to know if everyone receives a mailing, but one way to test is to watch our daily stats for all campaigns, here.  If there’s no bump today, we have a problem.

I’ve now written to our key editors and our mailing lists in Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, French, Spanish, Polish, German, and Dutch are now ‘owned’ by them — and they’ve all gotten an email with basic instructions on how to mail to their lists and how to create customized subscribe pages in their languages.  Doing this is quite easy in PHPlist and was slower and more cumbersome in our previous system.

Large lists without owners at the moment are Italian (419 – between translators at the moment), Portuguese (199 – must find a volunteer translator), and Russian (222 – must find a volunteer translator).  I’ll try to have these sorted in the next several days.

All 24 of our mailing lists are now running PHPlist on our new, US-based laborlists.org server.  Moving the 53,000 strong English list proved to be somewhat tricky, but that is now complete.  It’s quite easy to give control of these lists to our editors, and the first one — Espen — has been given control of the Norwegian, Danish and Swedish lists, with other editors to follow in the next few days.  In a few days we’ll be able to shut down our use of unionlists.org.uk, saving us £720 a year.

PHPlist is an open source newsletter manager.

My plan is that in 2010 we will consolidate all our lists (and the IUF’s as well) under the laborlists.org domain, which is running the open source PHPlist system.  We will not only save hundreds of pounds per year, but will also have the flexibility to create lists at will, which will come in handy as we get closer to our upcoming conference, and for specific campaigns.  We’ve lacked this flexibility and control in the earlier systems we used.  PHPlist also contains a double-optin subscribe mechanism, list segmentation, click tracking and other features.

Over the weekend, I moved the following lists to the new system: LabourStart Correspondents and these languages – Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, Chinese, Czech, Esperanto, Greek, Creole, Bulgarian and Finnish.  (None of these are being used at the moment.)  If you visit LabourStart in any of those languages (Czech is a good example) you’ll see the new ‘join our mailing list’ form at work.

I intend to begin moving the more complex mailing lists — the ones we use regularly — over the next few days.  Attentive readers will recall that I attempted this a couple of years ago without success — couldn’t get PHPlist to work, even with technical support from the company.  This time, for some reason, it worked without a hitch.  Thanks go out to Jasper Goss of the IUF Asia Pacific region who convinced me to give it another go, and suggested a very inexpensive web host in the USA which they have used for years.

Here are today’s totals with the change since the end of November in brackets.

UnionBook has not actually lost members; what’s happened is that I’ve deleted hundreds of banned members.  The current number is almost entirely real trade unionists using the site.  Our mailing lists have hardly grown at all, due both to the holiday season and the lack of new, inspiring campaigns.  The Facebook group continues to grow fairly dramatically, as does the number of followers on Twitter.  Our new LinkedIn group has quintupled in size over the last month, though I can’t say we’ve yet found a real use for it.

• Mailing lists – subscribers: 60,535 [+217]
• UnionBook – members: 4,328 [-608]
• Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 2,604 [+90]
• Twitter – followers: 1,940 [+70]
• Correspondents: 722 [+8]
• Union group on Flickr: 526 [+4]
• LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 79 [+65]

One of my goals in 2010 is to save LabourStart a considerable amount of money by reducing the number of servers we currently run and web services we pay for.  In addition to the LabourStart site on 1&1 Internet, we have a server on Memset (for UnionBook – £3,367/year), one on 1&1 Internet (for an abortive attempt to set up PHPlist but also currently running a number of IUF mailing lists – £207/year), and we pay a monthly fee of £60 to UnionLists.org.uk for our mailing lists (£720/year).

I want try to shut down the last two of these and have taken the advice of the person who does the IUF’s Asian Food Worker site and have purchased a very low cost server in the US (£120/year).  My intention is to set up PHPlist there and run all the LabourStart lists and possibly the IUF lists as well.  I have already registered the domain name laborlists.org for this server.  The cost saving will be £807 per year.

We’ll obviously also be looking at ways to reduce UnionBook costs, or to get a union (or unions) to pay for this.

We keep getting asked to promote workers’ rights campaigns and we keep having to say yes — that’s the nature of our business.  There’s already a queue forming and even as I write these words, we’ve got another appeal coming in from 12,000 workers in Turkey.  Today’s mass mailing — the second this week — has an update about the Sun International dispute which I’ve published on UnionBook as the union (SACCAWU) doesn’t update its website; appeals from the Clean Clothes Campaign and American Rights at Work for their Triumph International and T-Mobile campaigns; and finally a plug for the book, Click Clack Moo, which is a perfect Christmas gift our supporters can buy for their kids.

Today’s mailing makes much greater use of rich text formatting, with small images next to each story, and the images themselves can be clicked on.

Of the 3,185 people who voted so far in our photo of the year competition, more than 20% were not on our mailing list but have agreed to be added to it.  The net gain for our English language is 682 new subscribers.

Interestingly, as these were added in four batches of 700 each (there were around 2,800 who agreed to be added to our list, though most were already on it), we could track how many newcomers were in each batch.  The first group was mostly people who were already on our list, but by the time we reached the fourth group, they were nearly 40% people who came to the competition without having already been on our mailing list before.  In other words, the people who vote last in a competition like this are the most valuable to us — they’re the ones who learned about it, and LabourStart, from somewhere else.