Inside LabourStart

I’ve had a discussion with some of the senior correspondents and have also triggered a discussion on the e-Campaigning Forum mailing list, have learned a few things, and wanted to share some thoughts.

First of all, our current quarterly fundraising campaign is going poorly.  We’ve raised just £1,534 even though we’ve mailed to our English, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Hebrew, German, Hungarian and Indonesian lists.  Our message therefore has reached 100,045 people who have donated an average of 1.5 pence (£0.015) per person.

This has to be understood in the context of what are actually rising donations to LabourStart — we’re up 30% compared to where we stood two years ago.  Many of those donations are from unions — local, national and global unions.

But we need to take some steps to improve our ability to raise money from the individuals who support our campaigns and who are on our mailing lists.

Basically, it comes down to two things — though I welcome suggestions for more:

First, I will now return to an annual appeal for funds rather than a quarterly appeal.  That way, people will be getting 20 or more campaign messages from us over the course of a year before they hear from us asking for money.

Second, based on the extraordinary success story of Greenpeace UK, I will embed a much more prominent and clearly branded donation form on the “landing page” people see when they sign up to a campaign.  Apparently, the best time to ask people for donations is when they’re actually supporting a live campaign.