Inside LabourStart

As part of my general de-Googling of my life, I thought I’d look into alternatives to Google Analytics — not that we’ve been using that all that much.

Clicky got some good reviews so I’m experimenting with its use on our site.  After a day or two, I’ll tell you what it tells us — and how it compares to what 1&1 Internet’s stats program tells us.

At the moment, it’s just fun to watch …

Look at the difference – DuckDuckGo and Google – search for “LabourStart”.

That’s the title of a two-page article that appears in the current issue of the magazine for members of the German Esperanto-Federation and the Austrian Esperanto-Federation.  It means “to act for human and labour rights”.

The article is attached: Esperanto_Aktuell_3.2013reta – see pages 10-11.

Campaigns: We launched two new campaigns this week and closed down one.

Our campaign in support of General Electric’s Erie, Pennsyslvania workers (organized by the UE), has already gotten over 7,500 messages sent in 9 languages with more to come.

The UK-only campaign we launched in support of outsourced workers at the University of London has gotten just under 1,200 messages.

In addition, we closed down the Turkey campaign after 3 months — a campaign which generated 12,700 messages making it one of the largest we’ve ever run. According to the ITUC, “KESK does consider it [our campaign] to be one of the elements in a whole joint effort which eventually led to the release of several dozens of trade unionists, even if 90 of them remain in jail to date.”

We now have a version of our campaigns that works really well on phones and tablets and expect to go live with it sometime today. (Read more here).

We discovered a problem on our campaigns page — it seemed that quite a large number of people were clicking on the ‘share on Facebook’ link but not actually sending off messages. It may be that the page design was flawed. This has now been fixed (read more here).

We helped the TUC with a special mailing to our UK list about their online campaign to pressure the Gap and Debenhams to sign up to the Bangladesh Accord.

News: We’ve made some fixes to our various pages, including these:

A country page (e.g., the UK) that is supposed to show one language (e.g., English) will now only show campaigns in that language.

On the French Canadian edition, we’ve now fixed some translation problems Andy reported.

We’ve made some steps forward on the Turkish and other editions getting them ready for launch using the new format for all languages.

We fixed a glitch that was sorting some news stories on the country pages in the wrong order, as Roy reported.

We also dealt with the problem of a state/province appearing on the wrong country page, discovered by Derek.

And finally, we made the photo of the day and the campaign photo appear on the front page with the same width for each one, so the page won’t appear to be lop-sided.

Berlin 2014: We’ve been in touch with the ITUC this week about coordinating our efforts.

Events: There have been some improvements to the Events module now displayed on the front page of country pages in English. (See here for example.)

We’re not showing old events anymore.

We have a link to show more events if there are any. (This page is being improved to look nicer.)

And we’re currently working on a link to submit events which will appear together with the events.

Publicity: I had articles in Stronger Unions (UK) and Our Times (Canada), both on labour themes. I’ve also been in touch with Equal Times (ITUC) and Neues Deutschland about articles on labour issues.

We’re running an ad campaign on Facebook now — here are the numbers so far: Ad seen by 37,747 people in the UK and Germany; 264 of them have liked our page, bringing the total number of likes up to 6,964.

Books: We’ve sold 251 copies of the Global Labour Movement book so far, plus 18 Kindle editions for a total of 269. This is a slower sale than our previous book, which sold more than 400 copies during the first month. We hope that bulk purchases from unions can help.

Fundraising: We just received a very generous donation of £5,000 from the ITF, and C$500 from Canadian labour lawyers.

I thought comrades might be interested in reading this piece, written for Canada’s independent labour magazine Our Times.

“Responsive design” is a new buzz-word in the world of web design and was coined by Ethan Marcotte in this landmark article.

It basically means – your website should render correctly on every device, from the smallest mobile phone to a large screen television.  I’ve spent the last few days working on our campaigns and am very pleased to have made a breakthrough in the last 24 hours.

I still have a bit more tweaking to do, but basically if you go to http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign_responsive.cgi?c=1828 it should look pretty normal on your desktop or laptop, but visit that on your phone or tablet, and it should look very different — one column, red top, etc.

If you want to test this on your phone, no need to type in that whole URL – use this shortcut:

http://bit.ly/ZqBpak

The main reason to do this is because we know that a large number of our readers — possibly tens of thousands — are now using email on their mobile phones and tablets, and when we send a message saying we want them to support our campaign, and they click on the link, we want this new, single-column screen to come up so it’s easy for them to sign up to campaigns while sitting on a bus or in a cafe.

The next step is to fix this page so it renders well on the phone and then, of course, to change that URL by dropping the “_responsive” bit.

Edd has already begun work on the next stage — making sure our news pages also render correctly on phones and tablets.

One of the odd things we used to notice was that sometimes, especially at the start of a campaign, the number of people who seem to be recommending the campaign on Facebook (which we displayed) exceeds the number who actually sign up to the campaign.

This may have to do with the fact that the ‘recommend on Facebook’ button appears higher on the page and is therefore somehow more prominent.

So some people have probably been clicking on it, as one might do with an article on a website, not realizing that they haven’t actually supported the campaign yet.

Today, I’ve removed this from the page.

You get another chance to share on Facebook after sending off your message, and I think most people have figured out by now how to share a link on Facebook anyway.

Let’s see if this leads to even a small growth in the number of campaign supporters.

We’ve launched a campaign at the request of UE today.  Some publicity today, much more tomorrow.

And this one (UK only) launched in support of outsourced workers at the University of London.

Campaigns: As reported below, we closed two big campaigns this week. I also posted below a summary of the results of our recent Philippines campaign – written by the union there. We had a meeting in the LabourStart office with a representative of cleaners in London and are looking forward to creating a UK-only campaign for them in the next few days. Edd and I have both been working on creating a mobile-friendly version of our campaigns and hope to have results in a few days.

Events: We’ve gone live with this new module – see details below. It’s just one more service we offer to the international labour movement and one more reason to visit LabourStart every day.

Publicity: To our surprise, there was a full page in Neues Deutschland about LabourStart this week. This could not have come at a better time as we strive to raise our profile in Germany.

Books: Sales of the Global Labour Movement book rose by just 44 this week, up to 224. The first book (Campaigning online) was doing better at this point. This week, I plugged the book yet again to 12,000 trade unionists on our UK list, but got a minimal response. We’ve now sorted out a Kindle edition of this book and will begin publicizing it. Last week, we arranged for ‘extended distribution’ of both titles, meaning they should be available in many local bookstores and shops other than Amazon. Meanwhile, it turns out that CreateSpace has been very poor about payments to us — we’ve raised this with them and they’re invesigating. The total sales of both titles should have earned us over £720 — but we’d only received about £211 of that so far.

Fundraising: The head of Geneva-based charity that promotes human rights in the workplace visited our offices last week and we discussed a number of areas of possible joint work and funding. I followed this up with a detailed proposal on Friday.

Correspondents: Edd has identified 128 active correspondents who are not on our mailing list. We’ll be following up, trying to make sure that we can email to all correspondents. In addition, he’s written to all UK correspondents to encourage them to be more active, and to tag their stories by region (Scotland, Wales, etc).

We’ve gotten permission from IndustriALL to close down two campaigns, one of which is one of the largest we’ve ever done.

The Bangladesh campaign got 14,306 messages sent and appeared in 14 languages.  Though it didn’t reach the 17,214 messages sent in the June 2012 campaign around the case of the Iranian teacher Ghanbari, it ran for just 26 days — and most important, it lead to a major win.  (Mailing is going out today to our lists.)

The Mexico campaign was part of our contribution to IndustriALL’s global week of action in February and resulted in 9,578 messages sent in 15 languages.  The struggle at PKC continues and the union will let us know if a new campaign is needed in the next few weeks.