… has just gone out. It’s brief and to the point and thanks all 64 of them for their donations in 2008. My plan is to do a short mailing to the donors every month to keep them informed and to encourage them to continue their support.
This is a positive development. Early in 2008, for the first few months actually, there were practically no individual donations. But adding a prominent donation button to the final page of our campaigns has triggered some people to dig deep into their pockets. Fewer than 10 donate regularly, but this is certainly a huge improvement over the past.
In the last two days, I’ve been inputting the names and email addresses of all our donors into a database using Highrise and plan to continue doing so in the future. I think a monthly message to our regular donors is in order and will send out the first one next week – thanking them for what they did in the previous year.
Nominations close in one week and then we’ll have a mechanism in place for correspondents to select the shortlist. At the moment we have sites nominated from the following 31 countries:
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.
We just hit the 400 members mark, thanks in large part to our first, but likely not last, Labour Photo of the Year Contest.
Just as importantly, we now have 3,701 photos in the group, the latest being a shot of Kamal Abu Eita announcing the formation of the Independent General Union of the Real Estate Tax Collectors in Egypt. I’m mentioning this because this photo illustrates (pardon the play on words) the geographical diversity of the subjects of the photos in the group. Unlike much of what’s on Flickr, our group isn’t quite so focussed on the global north.
If you haven’t already visited the group, do so at:
In a seminar I recently attended on the subject of online campaigning, I heard a bit about the notion of power users, of a core group of supporters who can be relied upon to participate in many more campaigns than the average.
Some time ago I prepared a script that would show us who these people were, and have now updated it.
Basically, we have 205 individuals who participate in every single campaign we launch without exception. We need to find ways to make the best use of this information and to cultivate this group. Any ideas?
Barely 6 days into our ‘soft launch’ – we haven’t told our 60,000-strong mailing list yet – and we have 300 confirmed users tonight. They have created no fewer than 34 groups – with some great ideas among them.
I originally expected we’d get around 10% of the 2,500 people in our LabourStart Facebook group as well as our correspondents to sign up, so 250 would have been good for the first stage. It’s becoming increasingly clear that we’ll have 500 signed up users even before we go public in January.
In fact, if all goes as I hope, we’ll have ten times as many users as we have now by the end of next month – over 3,000 users and probably a couple of hundred groups. Wow.
The Janos campaign has been closed after more than 3 months. This has been one of our smaller campaigns, with a total in five languages of under 1,000 messages sent. We’ve been told by the UE, which asked us to launch the campaign in August, to suspend the campaign and have been thanked by the union in Mexico. “Unfortunately, there is nothing to report publicly at this point,” we’ve been told.
This image now appears on the front page of LabourStart in English only — it links to m.labourstart.org
All the other languages are now ready to go — see, for example, Spanish and French. We simply need to decide how to link to these on those language home pages.
So far, our readers have made 267 nominations. If you wish to nominate a site or two yourselves, please click here.
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