Inside LabourStart

Following our conference in Washington in August, I decided to follow the example of the DC Metro Labor Council and move from weekly (or less frequent) mailings to daily (if needed).  I thought that in doing so, we could focus each mailing on one subject, which is known to be much more effective than mailings that cover a number of topics.

We have been mostly successful with this, but today is an example where we cannot do it.  The IUF’s victory in its Casual-T campaign targetting Lipton / Unilever is obviously hugely important and they want us to tell everyone about the win.  The RMT in the UK has asked us to promote again the Eurostar campaign which is now leading to more strikes.  We’re in the final days of the Labour Photo of the Year competion and do need to send out at least one more reminder to boost participation.  And we’ve been trying for the last few weeks to promote book sales and we’ve had a book of the week to push.

That’s already four things we needed to tell our lists and there will certainly be more tomorrow and the day after.

Obviously, we’re not going to do more than one mailing a day, but we should be aware that the goal of one message, one topic may become increasingly unrealistic.

Meanwhile, only one person of the 60,000 or so on our lists has written to suggest that we’re sending out too many messages and should return to the weekly mailings.  Certainly there are others that feel this way, but to have gotten only one complaint is actually quite encouraging.

As I pointed out yesterday, there’s nothing like email to promote a campaign.

Using our newswires, Twitter, our website, etc., we managed to get about 11 messages sent in the first 24 hours this campaign was online.

In the last 24 hours, since our mass mailing went out (in English, and then later in the Scandinavian languages), we’ve gotten 1,821 messages sent.

So we can say that email is about 180 times as effective as any other tool we have to promote campaigns.

Let’s hope this helps persuade the Iraqi government to back off.

I wrote here on Friday pointing out that the size of our mailing lists continues to fall as the number of bounced addresses exceeds the number of new subscribers.

But that’s not the only problem, even if it is the biggest one.

We’ve had problems recently getting the mailings out, waiting several hours last time and again delayed this morning.

As you may know, for more than a year now we’ve been using UnionLists.org.uk as our provider, and we’re paying a lot of money for this service (£720 a year) though this is much less than we paid for the commercial iContact service which we used from 2007-8.

These delays in sending out messages are unacceptable and I’ve written to them about this.

We also have the ongoing problem that many people either do not see the footer on every message telling them how to unsubscribe, or do not understand it, and as a result, every week we get angry complaint letters from readers who want to get off our lists.

It would be better if they all saw an unsubscribe link and could just click on it.

Telling them to key in a certain word (unsubscribe) in a certain field (subject) in an email to a particular address is apparently too complicated.  I spend several minutes every week manually deleting (and in some cases changing the address of) subscribers.

Reading angry, and sometimes threatening, emails, is also no fun.

Any really good suggestions for coping with these problems would be appreciated.

One of the things that is not widely known is that unless you constantly recruit new members to your mailing lists, over time they will gradually begin to shrink.  This is because people’s email addresses change all the time, and once a message has bounced a certain number of times, our software (and any good mailing list management software) removes them from the list.  In the last two months, despite several large campaigns, we’ve seen a net fall yet again of several hundred addresses from our lists, particularly the English list which is far and away the largest.  In fact, the size our lists overall is no larger now than it was at the beginning of the year.  For the latest numbers, go here.

On 23 August, just after our conference in Washington, I posted a report here with some numbers and I’d like to update this about once a month.  Here are today’s totals with the change since August (always increases) in brackets.  Most notable are the very large gains to our number of Twitter followers and our mailing lists (and this is a net gain, as we loose many subscribers each month due to bouncing email addresses):

• Mailing lists – subscribers: 59,000 [+394]
• UnionBook – members: 4,539 [+522]
• Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 2,013 [+21]
• Twitter – followers: 1,571 [+378]
• Correspondents: 687 [+16]
• Union group on Flickr: 491 [+32]

My plan to attempt daily mailings in English, each one with its own distinct topic, isn’t working — at least not today.  A half dozen things hit us all at once, and as I will not be at my desk most of this week (I’ll be in Geneva), it was important to get all this stuff out at once, today.

A top priority was the IUF’s current Pakistan campaign — we were asked to help.  And at the same time, we got reports from two of our partner organizations in Israel about campaigns we’ve promoted to our readers (and it’s hugely important that we update them when we have such news).  This week also sees the opening of the trade union congresses in the USA and UK, which we could not pass up, especially as they’ve both picked up on so many cutting-edge web ideas which we too want to promote.  And we wanted to continue with offering a new book every week, and actually delayed the launch of the Union Strategies for Hard Times book which should have gone out last week.

I could have tried to create four or five separate mailings and staggered them throughout the week, and somehow delayed the sending each day, but felt it would be simpler and easier this one time to do it this way.  But let’s hope that this doesn’t continue and that we can return to the idea of one topic, one mailing, each day.

Starting today, we’re experimenting with daily mailings to our list in English.

This follows upon our Washington conference where two presentations made it clear that this is something we need to try.

• First, we saw at the SEIU how short messages with only one subject are much more effective than online newsletters with lots of topics.  (We knew this, but this was reinforced.)
• Second, we heard of the success of the DC Metro labor council which went from weekly to daily mass mailings, and found these to be much more effective.

Obviously, we will only mail if there is something important to say, so there may well be days when we do not do a mass mailing at all.

We anticipate a small drop-off of readers who will not want to receive a daily message, but this should be compensated by the messages being more effective and producing good results faster.

I have informed our translators that we do not expect them to translate these daily messages and instead will prepare a weekly mailing for them, as before.

Eric:  This is the first time we’re using the terminology “next year’s conference.”  We should continue to do these conferences annually in different parts of the world.  Canada?  Does not necessarily have to be coordinated with ITUC events.  A West-coast conference in Vancouver could concentrate on trade unionism in the Pacific basin.  If on the east coast, Toronto would be a possibility.

• We now have over 59,000 addresses on our mailing lists.
• We’ve sold 29 copies of the Global Unions book — I was hoping to sell more (ideally, 100).
• UnionBook is 11 members short of the 2,500 member mark.
• We’ve helped the CAW in Canada by promoting one of their campaigns – but not as a LabourStart campaign.