Inside LabourStart

I was commissioned by the International Centre for Trade Union Rights (ICTUR) to write a short article about our August 2009 conference for their journal, International Union Rights. Here is what I wrote:

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The British Trades Union Congress (TUC) has invited me to do a series of short talks to trade union reps around the country on the subject of online campaigning.  Naturally, the talk focusses on LabourStart and encourages the reps to get active with our ActNOW system.

Last Saturday I spoke in London to around 100 reps, yesterday in Leeds to around 30 and on Monday I’ll be in Manchester doing it again.  I begin with a show of hands — how many people have heard of LabourStart and seen the website.  In London, the vast majority were familiar with it. In Leeds, a minority.  I’m not sure why this is the case, but it demonstrates the importance of actually meeting people face to face and telling them about the site and the campaigns.

Following our conference in Washington in August, I decided to follow the example of the DC Metro Labor Council and move from weekly (or less frequent) mailings to daily (if needed).  I thought that in doing so, we could focus each mailing on one subject, which is known to be much more effective than mailings that cover a number of topics.

We have been mostly successful with this, but today is an example where we cannot do it.  The IUF’s victory in its Casual-T campaign targetting Lipton / Unilever is obviously hugely important and they want us to tell everyone about the win.  The RMT in the UK has asked us to promote again the Eurostar campaign which is now leading to more strikes.  We’re in the final days of the Labour Photo of the Year competion and do need to send out at least one more reminder to boost participation.  And we’ve been trying for the last few weeks to promote book sales and we’ve had a book of the week to push.

That’s already four things we needed to tell our lists and there will certainly be more tomorrow and the day after.

Obviously, we’re not going to do more than one mailing a day, but we should be aware that the goal of one message, one topic may become increasingly unrealistic.

Meanwhile, only one person of the 60,000 or so on our lists has written to suggest that we’re sending out too many messages and should return to the weekly mailings.  Certainly there are others that feel this way, but to have gotten only one complaint is actually quite encouraging.

I’ve sent out a reminder to our translators in Norwegian, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Polish and Italian, as I now do every week – but this time pointing them to this page rather than Posterous, which is incomplete.  Some of the mailing lists have been relatively inactive — the most recent mailings went out as follows:

• Polish – 13 July
• German – 31 July
• Spanish – 14 September
• Dutch – 5 October
• Italian – 12 October
• Norwegian – 20 October
• French – 21 October
• English – 23 October

More than a decade has past since we launched the Labour Newswire.  As union websites told us they added the newswire, we added them to our global directory.  The problem is, we don’t know when those sites remove the newswires or if the sites themselves disappear, and we don’t always know when new sites start using the newswire.  Which is why we need to go through the directory from time to time and clean it up.

I’ve just completed the clean-up of the UK section, which has dropped from 124 to 35 sites.  If this is true for most countries, then the actual number of websites using our newswires is closer to 200 than to 700.

The good news is some very large and important sites continue to use our newsire in the UK, such as the UNISON national and Scotland regional sites, and the national websites of PCS, TSSA and USDAW.  (Napo has temporarily taken the newswire down from its national site, but the General Secretary assures me that it will soon go back up.)  The popular TUC’s UnionReps.org.uk site continues to use it.  The health and safety newswire is particularly successful.

My next task is to start visiting UK union websites which do not use our newswire and get them to do so.  If any of you can do the same with your countries, it would be appreciated.  (I know that Stuart is working on the USA.)

I’ll soon be sending this out to our list. Here they are.

John Wood of the TUC writes:

The TUC now has a simple aggregator for union press releases at www.unionnewswire.org.uk. It’s very much in beta (meaning it’s likely to fall over at a moment’s notice), but could be a useful tool to save LabourStart correspondents interested in the UK a little time in searching round union sites.

It uses a service called Dapper.net to make RSS feeds for sites that don’t have them yet, and a modified implementation of WordPress.org to automatically bring together 19 feeds in one place, and output a common listing as a web page, RSS feed, Twitter feed or email alerts (daily digest), so you can get the news in the format you like.

Unfortunately this is still only a very partial picture. A couple of unions in the UK display their press releases in formats that a scraper can’t understand, so can’t be syndicated, and almost half the UK’s unions (mostly the smaller unions who may not be so active in media work) don’t publish press releases on their sites at all.

For interested nerds, the whole thing is built in the open source CMS WordPress, using the excellent Feedwordpress plugin. Some unions that publish their press releases online but not yet by RSS are also included, thanks to the RSS scraping service open.dapper.net. Feeds that don’t quite fit are modified in Feedburner.com and/or Yahoo Pipes. Twitterfeed.com takes the combined RSS feed and publishes it onto www.twitter.com/unionnewswire

As all these tools are free or open source, the service only costs the price of a domain name and a shared hosting account to run (around £20 a year). I think aggregators may become useful tools for unions, helping us to share information around the movement for little cost, or to build instant portals with new views of a topic out of different types of information source – providing a useful service and a natural meeting point for people with any given interest, all under the banner of the union.

As I pointed out yesterday, there’s nothing like email to promote a campaign.

Using our newswires, Twitter, our website, etc., we managed to get about 11 messages sent in the first 24 hours this campaign was online.

In the last 24 hours, since our mass mailing went out (in English, and then later in the Scandinavian languages), we’ve gotten 1,821 messages sent.

So we can say that email is about 180 times as effective as any other tool we have to promote campaigns.

Let’s hope this helps persuade the Iraqi government to back off.

We launched a major new campaign yesterday. The soft launch (appearing on our home page, on the list of active campaigns on our site, via our ActNOW newswire, through our Tweets, status on UnionBook and Facebook, etc.) generated a grand total of 11 messages sent, including my own.  The difference between this and doing a mass mailing is enormous — so let’s not believe any of the hype about alternatives to email.  At the moment, there are no alternatives to email — this is the only effective way to build online campaigns.

Today I’ve sent the campaign, and a reminder to check our recent English language mailings on Posterous, to our volunteer translators, including our new Italian language translator.  I hope to have this campaign, like the previous one, translated into Russian as well.

Book sales have fallen — the sales of Economics for Everyone were a one-off.  Very few people bought either the Silkwood book or the cartoon book we promoted yesterday.  When we have a poor week, the income is really only pennies and we do have to wonder if it’s worth it for us to appear to be commercial when we’re not really making any money.  There is, of course, the educational value of promoting these books and the help we’re giving to UCS, to keep them going.

I’ll be speaking about LabourStart campaigns at a number of events in the next few weeks, including the South East Region of the Trades Union Congress in London this coming weekend, in Leeds and Manchester in the next few weeks (at TUC events), and at the International Metalworkers Federation communicators conference in Frankfurt next month.

As part of the effort to improve our capacity in other languages, I’ve been working with Andy Funnel to completely translate the interface for adding news in the French language for those correspondents who may not read English.  We’re nearly there — we’re working on the names of countries.  Once this is complete, we can do the same for other key languages, which will open the door to correspondents who do not read English.

I’ve been working on the Labour Newswire Global Network — the list of websites that use our newsfeeds — for the U.K.  I’m finding that a staggering number of sites have simply disappeared.  Unions that have merged into other unions — including some very large ones like the GPMU —  have simply given up on their domain names, which I find extraordinary.  Many local union websites have fallen into disuse, or evaporated into the ether.  In some cases, sites went through re-designs and in the process dropped our newswires.  Of the first 58 websites I’ve gone through, only 12 are active and using our newswires.  If this is true across all countries, then we don’t have 750 sites using our newswires — we are closer to having 150.  This means that we will need to seriously promote the newswires, especially the ActNOW one, to boost responses to our campaigns.

Meanwhile, the response to both our Photo of the Year competition and our Twitter survey have been great — much higher than anticipated.  2,833 votes cast so far in the competition with another 11 days to go (we’re already probably higher than we were last year) and the Twitter survey, with two more days to go, already has had 1,552 responses.  (More than two-thirds of the respondents do not use Twitter, by the way.)

I wrote here on Friday pointing out that the size of our mailing lists continues to fall as the number of bounced addresses exceeds the number of new subscribers.

But that’s not the only problem, even if it is the biggest one.

We’ve had problems recently getting the mailings out, waiting several hours last time and again delayed this morning.

As you may know, for more than a year now we’ve been using UnionLists.org.uk as our provider, and we’re paying a lot of money for this service (£720 a year) though this is much less than we paid for the commercial iContact service which we used from 2007-8.

These delays in sending out messages are unacceptable and I’ve written to them about this.

We also have the ongoing problem that many people either do not see the footer on every message telling them how to unsubscribe, or do not understand it, and as a result, every week we get angry complaint letters from readers who want to get off our lists.

It would be better if they all saw an unsubscribe link and could just click on it.

Telling them to key in a certain word (unsubscribe) in a certain field (subject) in an email to a particular address is apparently too complicated.  I spend several minutes every week manually deleting (and in some cases changing the address of) subscribers.

Reading angry, and sometimes threatening, emails, is also no fun.

Any really good suggestions for coping with these problems would be appreciated.