Inside LabourStart

When a person sends off a protest/solidarity message using our ActNOW system, they arrive at a page thanking them – and suggesting some more things that they can do.  This page has been built and rebuilt over the years and has become a mess.  The things we really want to highlight are buried, unimportant stuff is prominent, and so on.  And it looks like crap.

I spent quite a bit of time yesterday doing an attractive redesign which I hope to have finished today or tomorrow.

And in addition to an improved landing page, there’ll also be – once again – an email message sent immediately to campaign supporters acknowledging what they’ve done, thanking them, and suggesting next steps.  We used to do this, but stopped.

We’re taking some steps to ensure that we have comprehensive coverage of the nationwide day of protest in the USA today.

This includes special posts to this blog, to our Facebook page, Twitter, etc., as well as a mass mailing highlighting international support for American workers who are in the fight for their lives.

Please make sure to post any news you come across about this day of action.

I learned about PledgeBank at the recent NetRoots conference hosted by the British TUC in London.  Does anything think it would be a good idea to use this to promote LabourStart – and not only to fund us?  Looking forward to reading your comments.  (Please spend a few moments on PledgeBank first to get an idea of how it works.)

Our Facebook page went from 0 to 117 likes in the first 24 hours online.

Yesterday’s mass mailing focussed on the IUF’s victory in Indonesia against Nestle – driving a substantial amount of traffic to the IUF website as a result.

The number of submissions to the Labour Video of the Year has stalled.  Only 2 new submissions came in as a result of the mass mailing.

17 hours after our mass mailing went out and only 10% of the list has opened the message.  MailChimp claims that it’s normal for 20-30% to do so.  Our best result in the last month in a mailing to the English list was to get 18% to open.  Any ideas on how we can improve the open rate?  (It’s higher for mailings to our correspondents – as many as 24% will open a mailing.  Still, that means 3 out of 4 correspondents don’t open their emails from us.)