Inside LabourStart

We’re now up to just under 59,000 addresses on the mailing lists – with substantial net growth in the last couple of weeks due to the Iran campaign.

We now once again have a JavaScript and RSS feed for LabourStart.tv — these are highlighted on the LabourStart.tv page.  I’ve also added the story’s source to the list.

I’ve finally gotten around to testing the Vietnamese language interface for our ActNOW campaigns – it seems to work.

We may be very near the end of the DESA campaign in Turkey — we generated over 5,000 messages.  It seems like the union has won a big victory – more tomorrow.

I’ve fixed our old subscribe-me page — it was still directing some people (hopefully, not many) to our old iContact mailing list.

In the new year, we’ll be selling copies of the TUC-produced book, Hadi Never Died.  This is an opportunity to show our support for our Iraqi comrades and to raise a small amount of money for LabourStart.  I’ve done up the first page promoting this on UnionBook.  In January – on the 4th anniverary of Hadi Saleh’s murder – we’ll promote this to our entire list.

LabourStart’s Wal-Mart page and our newswire have now been fixed and work well with the new database.

We’ve had some problems posting French-language news stories from the ICEM – and the issue may have been solved by changing the URL field in our news links database to Unicode.  Fingers crossed.  Thanks to both Andy and Tom for pointing this out.

The daily counter for our campaigns is now fixed – thanks to Derek for spotting that it wasn’t working.

We’ve done some work on fixing the character encoding for our ActNOW newswire in Norwegian – the problem for the moment is deciding which character encoding most Norwegian union websites use.  Thanks to Espen for spotting the problem.

There was a problem if you clicked on a state/province name on our front page that included a space — e.g., New York.  This has now been fixed.

The form which allows readers to submit a news story didn’t have enough space for long URLs – this has now been fixed.

With another 104 addresses, we’ll cross the 60,000 barrier. That’s something to celebrate.

Andy (and possibly others) have suggested that we need to make available an archive of our older messages – and this is a good idea.  Actually, unionlists maintains an archive online for us — but obviously doesn’t include the year we used iContact.  The URL for the English language weekly mailings archive is http://www.unionlists.org.uk/lists/arc/labourstart-en and other languages will follow similar syntax.

Any thoughts on how we can use that?  A link from the front page – next to where you sign up?  Or a footer in every message we send out?  Or just a link in our regular menu?

I’ve re-sent the mailing which initially went only to correspondents about the winning photo – to everyone.  It’s already gone out to the English, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish lists.

This week’s mailing has just gone out. The main thing is to ask people to give our News Challenge bid some support, both by giving us five stars and adding supportive comments. If we can flood the News Challenge website with such messages, it might convince the judges that we really do have such a global constituency. I don’t know if this will have any effect, but I can’t see it hurting.

We’re also reminding people about last week’s Oak Harbor/Gap campaign which has drawn a response from the company and a counter-response from the union (which we’re publishing in full).

And there’s a reminder at the end about the U.S. elections which we really can’t ignore, even if we know for certain that I’ll get a handful of angry emails from supporters of minor, third and fourth party candidates. For 99.999% of the organized working class in the U.S., the impending victory of Obama and the Democrats is an event of historic proportions an we need to acknowledge that.

Impact of the email message:

As of 31.10 07:38 GMT –

• News Challenge – 21 views, rating of 2.3 stars
• Oak Harbor campaign – 2,430 messages sent
• Oak Harbor Facebook cause – 1,050 supporters
• Labour Photo of the Year – 2,648 votes cast

I’ve just added addresses of new subscribers to the list who came through the Oak Harbor campaign. The total in the last few days is 199 which is a nice gain. This is for the English list only.

I also spent some time today going through 26 emails I’ve recently received from people asking me to either unsubscribe them, subscribe them, or change their addresses. Yes, people can do all of this themselves, but I’ve long followed a policy of doing this for individuals when asked.

The results are always the same — only a few of the people are on the list because between when they email me and when I get around to unsubscribing them, they figure out how to do it themselves. Or it turns out that they are not on our mailing list at the address they think and I can’t find them. It’s time consuming, but it’s important to keep people happy.

It still surprises me how many of our 57,000 subscribers write to me personally, asking me to note their change. This sense of being a small community will eventually change. What will happen when we have a million subscribers?

Finally, following upon the advice given to me by Nick Holden from Unionlists, I’ve now gone into every one of our mailing lists and changed the email address from which messages are sent. It should no longer mention unionlists and from now on, in all lists, come from LabourStart <ericlee@labourstart.org>.

I’ve just sent out a mailing to our more than 52,000 subscribers in English. Even though it’s a Sunday, the effect of the mailing should be dramatic. The things we’ve asked people to do, and which we can monitor, include:

1. Sending off a message in support of Oak Harbor strikers and join the associated Facebook cause.
2. Voting in the Labour Photo of the Year.
3. Donating to LabourStart.

In order to measure the impact of the mailing, it’s important to know our baseline, where we are starting from. So here are the initial numbers:

• Messages sent in Oak Harbor campaign – 83 (English only)
• Signed up to Facebook cause – 132 (Yes, 49 more than those who sent messages)
• Labour Photo of the Year – 2,070 votes cast
• Donations – none so far today

Stay tuned – update coming soon …

Updated 27.10.08 08:51 GMT

Campaign – 1,536
Facebook group – 458
Labour Photo of the Year – 2,212
Donations – $80.00 (4 donations)

Our email lists continue to grow. Today, it turned out that 20% of those voting for the Labour Photo of the Year competition were not yet subscribers to our list, and had agreed to be added. That’s 429 more people on the mailing list — another great reason to have done this competition.

I’ve a couple of important fixes to the pages that show news by country (e.g., Canada) and state/province (e.g., Ontario).

First, we’re now showing the same list of languages on the latter as we do on the index pages and the news-by-country page.

Second, I’ve fixed the signup to our mailing list on the state/province page which was still showing the icontact details.

Third, there is now a mailing list signup for the first time on the national news pages.

This is important, because there is a daily trickle of people now signing up directly to the mailing lists from our news pages, and we know that the national news pages (especially the US one) are hugely popular.

We need to keep paying attention for things that may have slipped through in all the changes we’ve made in recent weeks as we moved over to the new database and mailing list system.