Inside LabourStart

Our news feed on Telegram.

New campaign coming: It looks like we have a new campaign coming very soon, this time from India. It will join the five campaigns we’ve launched in the last six weeks.

Telegram: We’re making a push to grow our number of followers on Telegram, and have widely shared that fact across social media.

Translators: We’re planning an online meeting of all LabourStart’s volunteer translators. You’ve all been sent a link to our Doodle poll so that we can agree the best time to meet — please fill that in if you’ve not yet done so. We’ve just added new volunteers for Bahasa and Serbian language translations.

Podcasts: We’ve added three new features to our podcasts — Fanmail (which allows listeners to send us feedback), Podroll (which allows us to add a list of our podcasting friends), and Dynamic content, which you can hear at the end of every podcast we’ve produced so far.

Home page bug: For a few days, clicking on almost anything on the right side of the home page would take you to our donations page. Contrary to popular belief, this was not intentional and has now been fixed.

Mailing lists: We added new subscribers from our various campaigns to 10 of our lists — the largest group was for the new Serbian language list.

News: In the first 22 days of August, our volunteer correspondents posted on average almost 92 stories per day. The most active correspondents this month were Derek, Eric, Pat, Kyle, and Roy.

LabourStart correspondents meeting, August 2024.

Correspondents: We had the first meeting of LabourStart correspondents in a very long time. We had participants from nearly all continents, most of them veteran correspondents, but a couple of brand new ones as well. We will convene these meetings quarterly from now on.

Mailings: We did our first A/B testing of a mass mailing for a very long time, in a mailing promoting the podcasts and campaigns in support of workers at Liberty Steel (Czechia) and Yura (Serbia).

Mailing lists: These grew by 42 this week (last week we added 129). Growth will continue to be slow because it is August and many of our supporters are on holiday, with many union offices closed.

Podcasts: We did a second interview this summer with Judith Kirton-Darling of IndustriAll Europe on the subject of the Liberty Steel campaign (Czechia).

News: In the first half of August (15 days), our volunteer correspondents posted 1,440 news stories — not bad considering how many union websites are closed for the month, with websites not being updated. Our most active correspondents in August were Derek, Eric, Patrick, Kyle, and Pat.

Campaigns: No new campaigns were launched this week and all campaigns are showing slow growth — probably because it’s August and many people are on holiday. I have reminded some of our campaign partners that it is very important to mobilise support in their countries for campaigns that they have requested — which unfortunately does not always happen.

Serbia: In addition to all the usual campaign stuff, I wrote my weekly column for Solidarity on this subject and shared it widely.

Mailing lists: Our lists continue to grow as campaign supporters are added. This week we picked up 129 new subscribers to the list, 70 of them for the English list.

Finances: We now have our first mailing list of donors, featuring people who donated to LabourStart in May and June this year. We will soon begin regular updates to that list.

Correspondents: All correspondents have now been invited to an online meetup on 13 August.

News: Our correspondents have posted 807 news stories in the first 8 days of August, which is extraordinary, considering that so many union websites are not updated this month. The most active correspondents this month have been Derek, Eric, Patrick, Kyle and Pat.

New campaign – Czechia: At the request of IndustriALL and IndustriAll Europe, we launched this campaign on 31.7. By today, it already had 1,721 supporters.

Serbia campaign and podcast: This campaign now appears in quite a few languages and we interviewed a comrade there, sharing this as our podcast. With 3,215 supporters after less than two weeks online, this is already our second largest online campaign. We’ve picked up almost 900 new supporters in the last seven days.

Campaign submission form: The form broke a few months ago — people were submitting campaigns and they were not reaching us. We’ve now migrated the form over to Jotform and this seems to work quite well — and it’s free.

Mailing lists: We finally closed down the Mailchimp account, having migrated all our lists back to Mailjet.

Correspondents: We’ve invited all correspondents to an online meetup later this month; this weekend, we’ll confirm the day and time.

News: On the first day of August our volunteer correspondents posted a whopping 133 news stories. The most active correspondents were Derek, Eric, Roy, Patrick and Pat. Who says August is a quiet month?

Congress of the Education International: We’ve offered complete coverage of this based on stories posted on their website, and publicised this fact widely across social media.