Inside LabourStart

In the last two days I’ve done two mass mailings to our list in English, both focussing on a single topic: labour films and videos.  (The second mailing is going out now.)

In the first, I pointed out our co-sponsorship with the Washington DC Metro Labor Council of the online database of union films plus the list of labour film festivals.  I encouraged people who had things to add to this list to contact Chris Garlock at the DC Metro Labor Council and I passed on several emails which I received to him.  The response was overwhelmingly favorable, and people want to know more.

Today’s mailing focussed on a book by Tom Zaniello — an encyclopedia of labour films.  Hopefully we’ll be able to sell a bunch of these.

The next and final step is the launch of our Labour Video of the Year competition — but that may have to wait until my return from the USA in another 10 days.

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.