Inside LabourStart

In the last week …

Belarus campaign: We’ve launched an ad campaign on Facebook following a small one on Microsoft (1,716 views of the ad, 15 clicks, no new supporters added). The Facebook ads, after two days online, were shown 9,833 times and 218 people clicked on them. The campaign currently has 6,475 supporters. So far, only one new supporter has been added through this advertising campaign. The campaign has now been translated into Arabic. Significant publicity was given to the campaign at this week’s ETUC congress in Berlin, but only a very small number of delegates there signed up to support it.

Poland IKEA campaign: This campaign has now been suspended after three months online.  We have not yet heard back from Solidarnosc on this.

The LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference is now behind us.  There’s a summary of what happened here.

In addition, in the last four weeks …

• Mailing lists: We’ve had problems with right-to-left languages using MailJet.  We’ve now tested Hebrew on a new service and it seems to work well.  We’ll migrate our Arabic and Farsi lists there soon.
• Finances: The conference cost us considerably more than we were planning (unexpected costs for hiring the hall, interpretation equipment rental, etc) and we did a successful emergency fundraiser to cover those costs.
• Advertising: To publicise our Belarus campaign we’ve started our first paid advertising campaign in a very long time.  We are initially using Microsoft, but have also applied to use Facebook again.  That campaign is now up to 6,420 but it could be much higher.
• Georgia campaign: Just before the conference opened we launched a campaign in support of Wolt workers in Georgia.  Today it has 5,080 supporters.
• Upcoming campaigns: We are expecting campaign proposals shortly from unions in Namibia and Israel.