Inside LabourStart

Our latest ad campaign on Facebook is now closed.  We spent US $336.89, showed our ad to 75,546 people, and picked up 773 new likes for our page.  In other words, each new like cost us about 50 US cents.  We’re now up to 7,585 likes for our page.  To reach 10,000 (getting another 2,415 likes) would cost us $1,200.  There is very little evidence to show that these new likes translate well into participants in our campaigns, correspondents, translators, or donors.  Any thoughts on whether we should continue to invest in Facebook ads?

We’re doing mass mailings today to encourage our supporters to Tweet this:

@RT_Erdogan Polis ?iddetini durdur, protestolara izin ver! Stop police violence, allow protests! http://bit.ly/18Q2O8Y #direngeziseninleyiz

And we’ve explained what this means:

• @RT_Erdogan – This is a direct tweet to the Turkish Prime Minister – his staff will see it.
• Polis ?iddetini durdur, protestolara izin ver! – The Turkish phrase meaning “Stop police violence, allow the protests!”
• http://bit.ly/18Q2O8Y – The address for our campaign.  People will see and more will send email protests.
• #direngeziseninleyiz – The most widely used hashtag by the demonstrators in Turkey today.  Using this hashtag guarantees that many thousands of them will see our tweets.

Please spread the word.  I’ll report back later to see what effect, if any, this has – including on support for our Turkish-language campaign (now 303 messages sent out of 17,229).

It’s been a busy morning.  I’m going to live blog here what’s going on.

15:05: I’ll end the liveblogging now.  We’re up to 16,931 messages sent to Erdogan.  That’s a gain of 37 in the last 2 hours, which is again a slowing down.  The response to the crackdown in Taksim Square today has been very limited — only 163 in the last 7 hours.  We’re still 283 signatures short of a LabourStart record-breaking campaign, but I’m sure we’ll reach that now — probably by tomorrow morning.

13:12: There’s been a small growth in the campaign, with 29 people signing up in the last 50 minutes.  We’ve also picked up a grand total of 7 new Twitter followers today, which is very low.  Last month we got 258 new Twitter followers, an average of more than 8 per day.  So today is actually below average, and that’s despite one Twitterer with 135,000 followers having retwetted one of our Tweets including a link to the campaign three hours ago.  Odd.

12:23: Ron Oswald is nearly done with his texting.  Meanwhile, I continue to Tweet, FB, etc.  The total number of new messages sent to Erdogan in all languages in the last 4 hours is just 97.  Not good.

10:50: The Turkish Prime Minister is tweeting furiously – see https://twitter.com/RT_Erdogan.  Feel free to tweet at him using @RT_Erdogan.  Meanwhile, continuing with updates to Facebook, Twitter, our news page, etc.  Still disappointed in the (lack of) growth of our campaign — we’ve only picked up 56 new supporters this morning, in the last 2 1/2 hours.

10:36: Have just written to 508 LabourStart correspondents.  Here is what I asked each of them to do:

• If you’ve not yet signed up to the campaign, please do so right now.
• Please spread the news about the campaign in your union — let’s grow this rapidly and flood Prime Minister Erdogan with messages of protest.
• If there is news from your country or union about what’s happening in Istanbul (e.g., your union issues a statement condemning the police violence) please make sure to post this.
• On Facebook, please ‘like’ and ‘share’ our posts about what’s happening in Istanbul.
• On Twitter, please re-tweet our posts today.

10:04: Continuing with Ron’s live reports. In the last two hours, the number of supporters of our Turkey campaign has gone from 16,768 to 16,808 — just 40.  Comrades — this is not good enough.

09:22: The IUF’s Ron Oswald is in Taksim Square; I’m getting live reports and sharing them on Facebook and Twitter.  Please help spread the word.  Posted several news stories.  Have tweeted 6 times in the last hour. Contact two members of the European Parliament, one of whom has already supported our campaign, to get their help.  Asked the British TUC if a demo was being planned.  Have been sharing Facebook stuff with other groups and pages.  Campaign has just under 16,800 supporters.

Campaigns
Turkey – This is the big one, likely to become the largest campaign we’ve ever done, and possibly even reach my personal goal of 20,000 messages sent, sometime this week.  Lots of updates below.
Small screen version goes live – Our campaigns now look MUCH better on smartphones and tablets, a first example of “responsive web design” on LabourStart, with more to come.

Berlin 2014
Edd and I drafted a very short document explaining what we’re hoping to achieve in Berlin at next year’s LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference.  We’ll be having a phone call with the ITUC today and a meeting with Gisela, who is based in Berlin, in two weeks, in London.

Publicity
We’ve been running a Facebook ad campaign for nearly 3 weeks now.  It’s cost us $288.00, the ads have been seen by 68,389 people in the UK and Germany, and we’ve picked up 677 new ‘likes’.  As a result of this, we now have 1,694 likes from the UK and 185 from Germany — making it our 6th strongest country.
As reported below, we got good publicity in the German/Austrian Esperanto magazine.

Books
Book sales continue to be slow.  In June, we sold only 19 copies of the Global Labour Movement book, and 4 of Campaigning and Winning (all in English).

Site traffic
As reported below, we’ve started using Clicky to provide real-time updates on traffic to our sites.  It was quite fun to watch a world map light up when we launched the Turkey campaign.

Internationalization
We’ve identified 11 “dormant languages” on our news pages where correspondents have ceased to be active.  We prioritized six of these (Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Portuguese, Farsi, Italian) and have posted a message on each one explaining that the page is not currently being updated, but asking for volunteers to help.  We’ve also begun writing to each mailing list in these languages and have already gotten some new correspondents.
We have been able to do those mailings and post messages in those languages because we have picked up a number of new volunteer translators.  We did this by writing to people from different countries who had signed up to the English language version of our Turkey campaign.  As a result, we have an unprecedented 24 languages for the Turkey campaign.
Finally, we continue to constantly update our news pages.  Most recently, our French-language Canada page is shaping up well, with top stories now for the first time.

Events
We now have a proper form to submit events and people have begun submitting them.  We’ll set this up so that events for specific countries are automatically sent by email to the appropriate editors who will decide what to post.  We’ll begin publicity to all our correspondents and subscribers once things quiet down a bit here …

It’s Sunday afternoon here in London (and Istanbul); we’ve picked up hundreds more supporters for our Turkey campaign than we had two days ago, when I last wrote.  We’re now up to 15,776 supporters.

If we can get 1,438 more supporters, we can honestly say that this is the largest LabourStart campaign ever — larger even than the Ghanbari campaign we did in June 2012.

The number to beat is 17,214 — and we’re almost there.

Of course I’d like this campaign to be our first to reach 20,000, but I’ll be delighted if at the minimum we reach that number.

Please do what you can to help promote it over the next day or two.

That’s right — our Turkey campaign has now topped 15,000 supporters.

It is on course sometime this weekend to become LabourStart’s biggest campaign ever.

Please use email, social media, word of mouth, everything to spread the word.

The new campaign in support of the Turkish unions, launched just 50 hours ago, has already gotten 10,771 messages sent and currently appears in an unprecedented 23 languages.

We’ve had translations done by people who’ve never worked with us before into Hebrew, Arabic, Portuguese, Finnish, Swedish, Dutch and Polish, in addition to 15 regular volunteer translators.

The campaign is currently growing at the rate of just about 200 per hour — something we’ve never seen before, not two days after launch.

We’ve done followup mailings to our English, French and Norwegian lists in the last 24 hours, plus two special mailings to the Canadian lists today.

This afternoon we’ve done large (>1K) mailings to the Italian and Russian lists, so combined with the second mailings to Norwegians, Francophones and Canadians this afternoon, we should continue to see substantial growth.

There’s also been an unprecedented push in social media, individual appeals to unions, and direct links made with mainstream journalists which may in the next few hours result in much greater publicity.

We have the full cooperation of the ITUC, British TUC, Amnesty International, some of the GUFs and our friends in Turkey, so it may be a while before the campaign begins to slow down.

For this to be our largest campaign ever, we need 6,443 more messages to be sent.  At the current rate (last two hours), we should break that record in 32 hours, or late tomorrow night …

I cannot emphasize enough how important this is:

http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign.cgi?c=1840

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains (50 or more) are highlighted in bold.

Mailing lists

English: 79,267 [78,105] +1,162
French: 6,046 [6,044]
Spanish: 4,660 [4,535] +125
Italian: 3,957 [3,914]
Turkish: 3,209 [3,208]
German: 2,906 [2,847] +59
Norwegian: 2,407 [2,390]
Russian: 1,962 [1,922]
Dutch: 879 [882]
Chinese: 828 [817]
Finnish: 560 [536]
Polish: 313 [314]
Japanese: 300 [262]
Arabic: 299 [299]
Portuguese: 241 [242]
Tagalog: 232 [228]
Farsi: 213 [213]
Hebrew: 207 [211]
Swedish: 178 [179]
Korean 154 [154]
Danish: 143 [144]
Indonesian: 128 [126]
Czech: 89 [89]
Thai: 67
Esperanto: 39
Vietnamese: 12

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 9,435 [9,177] +258

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 7,172 [6,596] +576
Members of LabourStart group: 5,180 [5,102] +78
Like LabourStart page (French): 312 [305]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 102 [102]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 75 [70] – new page launched this month

UnionBook –
Members: 5,530 [5,507]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,317 [1,272]

Union group on Flickr: 724 [721]

Website

Correspondents: 640 [633]

As part of my general de-Googling of my life, I thought I’d look into alternatives to Google Analytics — not that we’ve been using that all that much.

Clicky got some good reviews so I’m experimenting with its use on our site.  After a day or two, I’ll tell you what it tells us — and how it compares to what 1&1 Internet’s stats program tells us.

At the moment, it’s just fun to watch …