Inside LabourStart

This is odd, I think.

I did a mailing 43 hours ago to our list of 71,401 subscribers in English.  (It’s also gone out to the French and Spanish lists more recently.)  The mailing reported on the victory in the Auckland lock-out, and urged supporters to sign up to three selected urgent actions campaigns.

I listed these in the following order – Abdolreza Ghanbari (by far the most popular campaign), then Kamal Abbas (the third largest of the three, in urgent need of many more supporters) and then Matteo Parlati (whose campaign was stronger than the Abbas one but still considerably smaller than the Ghanbari one).

Because in most mailings, the links which appear first get the most clicks and the ones which appear last get the least, I assumed that the Ghanbari campaign would do best — and not only because it appeared first, but also because it is such a popular cause.

But the actual gains for the campaigns in the last 43 hours have been as follows:

• Matteo Parlati – 323
• Kamal Abbas – 252
• Abdolreza Ghanbari – 220

In other words, people signed up to support the campaigns in the opposite order to the one I listed them in.  And the most popular of the campaigns actually got the least support from this mailing.  The differences are significant — nearly 50% more supporters for the Parlati campaign than the Ghanbari one.  These are, therefore, unexpected results.

So why did they happen?

Here’s my guess:

I think that the list may be exhausted when it comes to the Ghanbari appeal, as we’ve mentioned it in three previous mailings – this was the fourth mention.

And I think that we picked up many, many new subscribers due to that appeal – so they will not have been familiar with the Abbas and Parlati cases, having joined the mailing list only recently.

It’s also possible that the descriptions I gave of the three cases made the Parlati one sound the most compelling.  Here’s how I described them:

• Abdolreza Ghanbari, facing the death penalty in Iran
• Kamal Abbas, who faces prison in Egypt for “insulting” a Mubarak-era hack at an ILO conference
• Matteo Parlati, the shop steward at Ferrari, facing prosecution for participating in an anti-fascist demonstration in Italy

One final thought: even the gain of 323 new supporters for Matteo Parlati, welcome though that is, is only a tiny fraction of what we’d get for a new campaign.  It’s less than one-half of one percent.  My hope had been that the win in Auckland would inspire people to respond, to want to do more.  But that didn’t happen.  Over 99% of the people on the list didn’t respond to this appeal at all.