Inside LabourStart

See this article I was asked to write for the Talking Union blog.

The good news is that I’m now devoting myself to beginning to fix as many of the genuine problems we’re having as I can.  The bad news is that the programmer we were employing to do this for us has no time to do it.  So it’s back to learning how to deal with Elgg.  Yes, it would be great if some volunteers with PHP experience would step forward to help, but that hasn’t happened so far and is unlikely to be the case, but I might ask in a future mailing to UnionBook users.  I’ll update you here meanwhile as I cross things off the todo list.

Done:

1. You can now search for groups – I explain how in a blog posting and in the Help page.  I will probably also point this out in our next mailing to UnionBook users.
2. I’ve written a script that allows an owner of a group (actually, at the moment, anyone) to email all members of a group.  Still working on the security, but in principle we now have a very powerful tool.  I’ve just sent out the first test mailing now.

Senior correspondent Oskar van Rijswijk came up with a great idea: Use Twitterfeed to automate tweets from LabourStart.  I set it up and it works.

Throughout the day, Twitter is being updated with three things from LabourStart:

• Our online campaigns
• Our global newswire in English
• Our latest book of the week

Right now, it works like a charm – you can see the results here.  Very cool.

In the last 24 hours, we sold $861.04 worth of books following publicity for our latest book of the week.  There were a total of 24 orders placed – one every hour.

This may be due in part to our new way of selling books (using a blog) which both gives us the chance to add more content (such as an author interview) and also provides links to previous books of the week.

If every day were like yesterday, we’d sell $314,279 worth of books in a year, of which we’d keep $31,428 (£20,786).

The unions in Turkey have agreed for us to shut down the May Day campaign.  We reached 2,759 messages sent in a very short period and the campaign was rapidly translated into seven languages.  For the first time in more than 3 decades, some trade unionists were allowed to meet in Istanbul’s Taksim Square.

We sold a total of $3,039.11 in April, with 64 individual orders placed over 30 days.  LabourStart’s share of that is $304 (£204) which while not spectacular is not bad.  We should remember that two of the titles we pushed hard in April were $10.00 books (May Day and I Knew I Could Do This).  We can increase revenue in part by selling more expensive titles ($10.00 is very cheap).  Our next book of the week is Why Unions Matter which sells for $17.95. We’ll be featuring an author interview with that one.

Under construction – but already a big improvement over what we had before.  We’re going to list all our recent books of the week and more – including author interviews, comments from readers, etc.  Click here to visit the shop.

The March 2009 issue of the magazine of the Education International features our photo of the year as well as a very nice article about LabourStart as its center pages.  You can download a copy here.

In May, Eric will be speaking to an EI communicators’ conference in Brussels about LabourStart and the net.

This column by Jakob Nielsen is worth reading – we should find some way to share this at least with our most active correspondents.

Last year’s was, I thought, a great success despite it being our first.

It was a lot of work however.  So I thought I’d ask if there’s interest in seeing it happen again before jumping in.

Comment here or contact me at derek.blackadder@sympatico.ca.

Thanks.