LabourStart in Numbers
Here are the totals with the last month in brackets:
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Mailing lists (with over 100 members)
English: 64,165 [63,650]
French: 3,116 [3,115]
Norwegian: 2,343 [2,368]
Spanish: 1,588 [1,571]
German: 806 [802]
Turkish: 693 [693]
Italian: 539 [540]
Russian: 518 [514]
Polish: 302 [302]
Portuguese: 252 [252]
Chinese: 249 [249]
Dutch: 229 [226]
Swedish: 202 [203]
Finnish: 179 [178]
Danish: 133 [134]
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Social networks
UnionBook 2.0 – members: 4,291 [4,176]
Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: ??? [4,399]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 2,550 [2,326]
Like LabourStart page (French): 65 [57]
Twitter –
English – followers: 4,360 [4,132]
French – followers: 74
Union group on Flickr: 649 [650]
LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 448 [418]
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Website
Correspondents: 900 [896]
Unique visits to the site this month : 483,791 [527,360]
Peak day: 22,291 – 31.8.11
Page views this month: 1,114,999 [1,208,283]
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Could we identify a few languages and make a concerted effort to grow those lists? Say the Chinese list-contact everyone (an appeal to our current list members, not just the Chinese list but perhaps all) and everything (CLB for example) and put on a real push. Adwords, the whole shebang.
It seems to me that if a few of us were prepared to take something like this on we could make some headway with all the smaller lists.
So, any volunteers?
Whilst we grow the smaller lists, we also need to work on the conversion rate of the larger ones (thanks Jason Mann &BCFed). To round up for the maths, let’s say the English list is at 60.000 and we’re getting 5.400 messages sent on average per campaign which is 9% If we could raise this rate to 12%, we would be getting 7.200 messages sent without growing the list. So we need to work on why people aren’t opening our emails and why most of them don’t send a message if they do. There can be a number of reasons like we’re directed to their spambox (have we pissed them off with multiple emails from us, facebook, unionbook, twitter, linkedin, etc.?), that our titles and texts, are not sufficiently motivating, etc. And the added difficulty is that we need attractive titles and texts which are easily translatable.
Good point. Do we just speculate or could we try a survey? I try talking to people whenever the opportunity presents itself and have shared some of the conclusions I’ve reached based on those comment elsewhere here.
Only those who open their mails will reply and they’re mostly already doing what we want.
We could try to analyze the list of unopened emails (Mailchimp gives us the addresses). Maybe there are common points: geography, hosts… We could even try to send them another email on the same subject with a different title and content to see if it gets opened. There may even be a pattern.
As American-English, UK-English and Oz-English (to name just those) aren’t quite the same language, we could also try splitting the list and sending targetted versions of the mail to see if we get a better result.
Once again, these are just a few ideas after watching the BCFed videos.
Thanks for raising some valuable points. Just wanted to add three small issues.
First, MailChimp does not accurately report opens as it can only do this if people enable images in their emails (Gmail, by default, does not); in other words, the open rate is certainly higher than MailChimp is showing, perhaps much higher.
Second, while we can certainly tweak this or that, playing around with subject lines and the like, we should not ignore the broader issue – which is that the average trade union member is unlikely to show a massive, consistent interest in international labour solidarity. Many of the people on our lists will have signed up because they support a particular union, or are interested in a particular country, and do not necessarily care very much about each new campaign we come up with. To use just one example, there are apparently some 10,000 people on our list who wanted to show solidarity with striking postal workers in Canada but are uninterested in the plight of trade unionists in Fiji.
Finally, I agree that the selection of campaigns, and how they are presented, is hugely important and we have largely left this in the hands of the global union federations and others – who sometimes may lack the writing or marketing skills we’d like to see.
These are all issues we should address at the upcoming Istanbul conference and I hope to see you all there.
1) So the “click-through rate” is even smaller than we thought.
2) I totally agree. So if we can “educate” some of them, even a small percentage, and turn them into power-users, we, LS and the international movement, can only gain. Perhaps even engage people more actively in their local unions in the process. I’m going to work on this with the French list by translating some of the top stories on LabourStart that never make it to the French-language newspapers (at least, not in France) and posting them on labourstart-fr.posterous.com. I’ll follow up with a newsletter and see how it works.
3) As for the GUF, most of them publish their translations anything up to a week after the information is published in English (if they bother at all). If we respect the rules when feeding the titles to the LS database, they are lost in the mass. This means that when we launch a campaign, we are (I am) often obliged to link to a “Want to know more” in English which is a turn-off if potential message senders click on it.
On Eric’s (2), yep, and as I recall we had an extensive discussion that touched on this here some months ago. The recent Canadian campaign illustrates this: we added a pile of Canadians to the lists (English and French), but are not seeing them all participate in the subsequent campaigns. I would love to know how many are though and wonder if, down the road, we might be able to start recording other data about the folks on our list: country (which I think we have started doing???), date of entry, that sort of thing. I’d be asking for it more enthusiastically except that I am fairly sure that having it, even now, would only satisfy our curiousity, not really improve the response rate.
The problem is and will remain that we do not have enough contact with the folks on our lists to be able to ‘educate’ or ‘convert’ them, to organize them for international work. So I suspect we will just have to continue building the lists in the expectation that any given campaign will get a 10-15% response rate. Perhaps half to 75% of them will be our hard-corse folks who respond to every campaign, the remainder will be occasional participants who join campaigns they are comfortable with for whatever reason.
Which returns us/me to the problem of growing the lists…