Apr
07
2011

In brief: Mailing list migration, mega-campaigns, campaign history, Arabic, site security

I continue doing the migration of most of our short and inactive lists to MailChimp – but am holding off on the biggest (Norwegian, French) until I have the consent of the editors.  Each day I migrate 5 or 6 languages over.

I’ve raised the question with the ITUC and some of the GUFs that we need a popular campaign – one that will get tens of thousands of supporters – in order to grow our list in the way that groups like 38degrees and Avaaz do.  Our campaigns tend to focus on little-known industrial disputes and often the first time anywhere has ever heard of these is when we campaign on them.  From time to time, we should take on more popular causes — and the growth of our mailing lists will mean that the smaller campaigns will benefit enormously.

I’ve posted a page where I intend to document all the campaigns we’ve done over the years — to see who has been asking us (recently, mostly GUFs), which countries are affected, how many people sign up, who the target was, and what the result on the ground was.  I’d personally find this useful when I give talks or write articles about online campaigning, but it will also more generally give us a sense of what we’ve been doing and where we should be going.

I’m in negotiations with an exiled Iraqi trade unionist in the USA — USLAW was circulating an appeal to people to help him out.  I think we’ll pay him something to translate some of our stuff (e.g., campaigns, mailings) into Arabic.

I’ve taken a number of important steps to make our site more secure, which I won’t be publishing here for obvious reasons.  Suffice it to say that the Berkman Center report on how human rights organizations are vulnerable to cyber-attack has influenced me and I had a fairly long to-do list of things which have all now been implemented.  I’m happy to discuss this with any of you by email.

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