We’ve sold 96 copies of the book for £10 each, making this one of the most successful efforts we’ve ever had with online marketing.
Copies were ordered by our readers in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Ireland, Germany, China (Hong Kong), and South Korea.
Packaging and addressing all the books is taking time, but everything should go out in the next few days.
Traffic to the site plummeted, as expected, as Christmas drew near. Nevertheless, we had 43,950 unique visitors in December, with 6,616 visiting on our peak day – 3 December. See a report here.
Two days after inviting our readers to purchase copies of the book ‘Hadi Never Died’ I’m very pleased to report that already 68 copies have been sold, for a total of £680. We have to pay the TUC £2 for each copy and there will be the costs of postage and envelopes, but we’ve made a few pounds and we’ve helped raise the profile of the Iraqi trade unions, so this is a good thing.
I’ve exchanged emails with the AFL-CIO this week about this. Now we need first of all to nail down the actual conference dates and then move on. Details soon, as soon as I have them.
I’ve just sent a message to all 525 correspondents for which we have email addresses inviting them to vote on the shortlist for this year’s Labour Website of the Year competition. You can watch them making their selections in real time, here.
I’ve closed the voting for the Labour Website of the Year. Our readers can no longer nominate.
We had a total of 376 nominations.
Nominations took place until the very end, with 1 on 31.12, 7 on 30.12 and 6 on 29.12.
We’ve had a massive increase in the number of sites nominated – from 104 last year to 170 this year.
… has just gone out. It’s brief and to the point and thanks all 64 of them for their donations in 2008. My plan is to do a short mailing to the donors every month to keep them informed and to encourage them to continue their support.
This is a positive development. Early in 2008, for the first few months actually, there were practically no individual donations. But adding a prominent donation button to the final page of our campaigns has triggered some people to dig deep into their pockets. Fewer than 10 donate regularly, but this is certainly a huge improvement over the past.
In the last two days, I’ve been inputting the names and email addresses of all our donors into a database using Highrise and plan to continue doing so in the future. I think a monthly message to our regular donors is in order and will send out the first one next week – thanking them for what they did in the previous year.
Nominations close in one week and then we’ll have a mechanism in place for correspondents to select the shortlist. At the moment we have sites nominated from the following 31 countries:
We now once again have a JavaScript and RSS feed for LabourStart.tv — these are highlighted on the LabourStart.tv page. I’ve also added the story’s source to the list.
I’ve finally gotten around to testing the Vietnamese language interface for our ActNOW campaigns – it seems to work.
We may be very near the end of the DESA campaign in Turkey — we generated over 5,000 messages. It seems like the union has won a big victory – more tomorrow.
I’ve fixed our old subscribe-me page — it was still directing some people (hopefully, not many) to our old iContact mailing list.
In the new year, we’ll be selling copies of the TUC-produced book, Hadi Never Died. This is an opportunity to show our support for our Iraqi comrades and to raise a small amount of money for LabourStart. I’ve done up the first page promoting this on UnionBook. In January – on the 4th anniverary of Hadi Saleh’s murder – we’ll promote this to our entire list.
LabourStart’s Wal-Mart page and our newswire have now been fixed and work well with the new database.
We’ve had some problems posting French-language news stories from the ICEM – and the issue may have been solved by changing the URL field in our news links database to Unicode. Fingers crossed. Thanks to both Andy and Tom for pointing this out.
The daily counter for our campaigns is now fixed – thanks to Derek for spotting that it wasn’t working.
We’ve done some work on fixing the character encoding for our ActNOW newswire in Norwegian – the problem for the moment is deciding which character encoding most Norwegian union websites use. Thanks to Espen for spotting the problem.
There was a problem if you clicked on a state/province name on our front page that included a space — e.g., New York. This has now been fixed.
The form which allows readers to submit a news story didn’t have enough space for long URLs – this has now been fixed.
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