Campaigns that no one supports?
It’s great that so many LabourStart campaigns these days get 5,000 messages or more sent. But there’s a big gap between what happens to our campaigns in certain key European languages (English, French, Spanish, Norwegian and Italian) and all the rest.
And in some cases, we have campaigns running that don’t have a single supporter.
I’ll be writing to our translators today to try to figure out with them what we can do — because there’s no point in translating campaigns that no one knows about.
Here are the current campaigns with zero (0) supporters – the number in brackets is the size of our mailing list for that language:
- Chinese (simplified) [357]: Colombia,
- Farsi [188]: Iraq, Turkey, Algeria
- Hebrew [153]: Colombia,
- Korean [93]: Bahrain,
- Vietnamese [12]: UK, Iraq, Algeria
Note that mailings did not go out in most cases to the lists.
Any correspondents with any suggestions about how to deal with the issue are invited to post comments below.
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It’s a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg stituation: campaigns help grow the language list, but without a list…
We need to make a concerted effort to contact people in each of these languages perhaps? Something for an intern’s to-do list?
In Italy we had a huge increase of the mailing list size, and subsequently of campaigns subscribers, after launching a campaign on Fiat. Fiom Cgil, the union requiring the campaign, spread the word thru their 200 thousands members.
Maybe we should remind some local unions they have the chance of receive international support through LabourStart?
Who are we targetting? Unionists using these languages in their home countries or the corresponding “diasporas”? The first seems far-fetched and in the second, we must consider the predominance of English. Why would someone who speaks two languages wait a week or so for a translation to an “urgent appeal”?
This is also the case with French. If you look at the lists, some bilinguals will sign up in English if the French mailing doesn’t arrive within a couple of hours. “Speed is of the essence”.
I don’t have the time at the moment, but it would be good to see if Mailchimp can tell us if people are sign-upped to 2 or more language lists.
1- We will post the Vietnamese articles on our Viet-language website, baovelaodong.com
2- We are planning to promote the articles to overseas Viet-language media, which target mainly overseas Viets
I don’t expect big or immediate results – partly because we have limited reach, and partly because the conversation among online Viets who care about human rights has been occupied with oppression in Vietnam itself. Also, most Viets that my groups can reach via 1- and 2- above would be capable of English.
Still, even a result of 1 is better than one of zero.
And I think Eric is strategic & right in starting this conversation.
@Andrea Yes, that can expand the mailing list but not always the number of people who send messages because the response to the “local” campaign is always much higher. For example, here are the numbers of messages sent in Italian in the last two campaigns and the “Matteo” campaign:
Algeria 92
Iraq 82
Matteo 515
We should really be looking at ways to better the “size of list/messages sent” ratio rather than just growing the lists (and spending money unproductively to do so).
I usually upload the Spanish language version of a campaign within 24-36 hours of receiving Eric’s email asking for the translation – which is probably a pretty decent turn-around time, given the time difference between London and America. There is a similar turn-around time for the mailings, but they then have to be sent out the Spanish mailing list by Eric, so that adds to the time lag between English and Spanish. If I could send the mailings out directly, that would improve the time.
On most mailings, we include a line asking recipients to forward the line to fellow union members, friends, and colleagues. Do the unions asking for our help on campaigns share their different/specific language mailing lists with LabourStart? I think that the first way of getting more people to participate in our international campaigns is to have the unions being helped to share the news of the campaigns directly with other unions in their home countries, as well as the international federations they are affiliated with if they are not doing that already.
@Trung. I too am glad that Eric started this topic and that’s why I’m trying to input a few ideas. What you say about human rights defenders concentrating on issues in their own country is probably right for all these languages (or worse).
In Western Europe and North America, we don’t have these problems on the same scale (yet, or should I say, before we go back there).
@David. I’ve been translating the French stuff for 5 years. I know it is not always easy and I know we are all unpaid volunteers, so I would be the last person on LabourStart to criticize translation times or the work of other translators.
However, once we put aside our union engagement, our passion, our hobby… there’s a stark reality: Money.
Our lists are reaching 100,000 addresses. Once we cross that line, as Eric has written elsewhere, the cost will be an extra £1,600 per annum (2,000 €). Is this a worry?
All I know is that if we were a business, our sales arguments would be 1) the number of addresses on our lists, 2) the number of languages we translate to, and 3) our results (messages sent).
I’m convinced it’s really time to look at this last parameter.
To set an impossible target : if campaigns were launched simultaneously in all languages, how many addresses inscribed on multiple language lists would become redundant?
@Andy: I am OCD enough to be obsessive about building the size of our lists but also see the need for us to become more effective in our participation rate. We’ve touched on this question in the past here. Notably when we have looked at campaigns with dismal numbers or numbers smaller than we thought they should be. We need a magic bullet…
There’s no magic bullet! Except the persuasiveness of the mailing, not only in English but through multiple translations.
Shouldn’t we be OCD about all the parameters that could make a difference and not just 1 of them?
P.S. For those who need a translation, OCD means “obessive compulsive disorder” – had to look it up!
Oops. Sorry about that. 🙂
Our Farsi language translator writes:
In the case of Farsi signatories, I can say nothing except that they are all depressed!
For years majority of Iranian activists have signed several campaigns in vain and now … I do not know, but may be writing a letter to all these listings and asking them to take campaigns more seriously, considering the ‘victories’, may work.