Inside LabourStart

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.

One of our readers has correctly pointed out that our mailings come from my name and are sent by unionlists.org.uk — so it’s not clear to her that they come from LabourStart. I don’t want to use ‘LabourStart’ in the subject line as many organizations do — I prefer to be flexible with that.

Instead, I’ve changed the name of the ‘owner’ of the list on Unionlists from ‘Eric Lee’ to ‘LabourStart’ and this should be reflected in the next mailing we send out (in English). If it works well, we’ll do the same for the other 21 mailing lists.

Espen commented:

sounds reasonable – ok with me