Inside LabourStart

Some of the things that have been keeping me busy in the last 8 days …

Canada – Acadia campaign. This has been launched, appears in 4 languages, responses coming in very slowly.  I’m prodding the union to do more to promote it and not to rely solely on the LabourStart mass mailing which will go out next week.

Twitter. Following the issues we had with Twitter, I suspended use of Twitterfeed and have just set up an alternative in HootSuite.  We’ll see how well this works.

MyCampaigns. This little script has been very effective in getting people to sign on to campaigns they may have missed.  We’re seeing good results in some of our older campaigns.  I’m tweaking the campaigns system slowly to make it more visible, and have arranged for its translation into other languages.

App. Our app is nearly ready, but there’s a problem with Conduit Mobile – we can’t change any details about our account.  I’ve asked for some help from them and am awaiting an answer before we submit the Apple App Store (and Android and others).

New website. I’ve resumed work on this, and have converted what I was doing into a Perl script — I’m more familiar with Perl than PHP and it will allow to have a dynamically generated home page with lots of interactivity and personalization.

Even if Derek Blackadder is away sunning himself on some beach, class struggle in Canada continues.

We’ve been asked by the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) to run an online campaign in support of locked out workers at Acadian Coach Lines in the Atlantic provinces of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.  That campaign is now live here.

We’ll be getting out the text to our translators and promoting it heavily over the next few days.

This one might get some traction in Europe – especially Italy and Germany, I hope.  Please spread the word.

Just as our Twitter feed was starting to grow …

A large number of accounts seem to have been compromised in the last 24 hours and I’ve gotten a very large number of identical direct messages from people.  Or apparently coming from people.

The form of the message is identical:

i cant believe this but there are some real nasty things being said about you here [link]

When I got the first one, I assumed it was real — it came from someone I knew, and sometimes (I know this hard to believe), “real nasty things” are said about me on the web.

But it wasn’t real, and he warned me off.

Since then, I’ve gotten a considerable number of email messages from people saying they’ve gotten this same message from us — from the labourstart account on Twitter.

I’m not sure what is causing this, but it’s not resulting in false tweets being sent out in our name.  But direct messages are going out, possibly to all 5,672 supporters of LabourStart on Twitter.  Shit.

So to put a stop to it, I’ve done the following things:

• I’ve changed our password.
• I’ve revoked access to Twitter to all apps that aren’t Apple or Twitter owned.  (These included one app recently installed precisely to prevent this sort of thing – Bitdefender Safego — which at the very least didn’t do its job and may itself have been compromised.)

The latter means that Twitterfeed no longer has access to our account and our feed will not be updated.  As a result of this, I will be looking into resuming use of Twitterfeed on Monday or an alternative – which we were looking for anyway.

Often when we launch a new campaign, and do a mass mailing, we get email complaints from people who say “it doesn’t work”.  What they sometimes mean is that there is a very long delay when they try to click through a campaign.  This is particularly true when a mass mailing goes out and several hundred people may be trying to simultaneously send off messages.  There can be a lot of reasons for that, but I’ve discovered one of them and have fixed this today.

Our campaigns are listed in a massive, flat ASCII text file – not a relational database.  This is a relic of the 20th century version of LabourStart.  We’re using a file that is over three million bytes in size when the optimum size for this sort of file is more like one million bytes.  By moving the closed campaigns to a different file, I’ve been able to reduce the size of that file by 90%.  Which should mean a much faster access to the data in it.

In addition, one tiny thing that might slow down the display of the page has been the call to Google Analytics.  As we no longer use this, I’ve removed a few lines of code at the bottom of the page — these lines were invisible to users, but may have caused a small lag.

In addition, and somewhat related to this, our web hosting company pointed out that the scripts we execute every 15 minutes which build all our newswires and stuff like that, may take longer than 15 minutes to run.  (There are probably over 200 scripts being run every 15 minutes.)  So I’ve changed this to run every half hour instead.  In theory, this should reduce some strain on the server, though we may want to look into a better solution down the road.

Some odds and ends – things that have kept me busy these last few days …

Twitter: We now have Canadian English and French feeds (thanks to Derek) and they’re quite popular. Today we mailed to over 9,000 Canadians on our list in the hope of making them even better known.  At the moment, the English feed has 364 followers; the French one has 20.

App: As I reported below, we’re pretty much ready to launch the iPad version and will probably do this in the next day or two.  It will, however, take Apple a couple of weeks to approve this and make it available in the App Store. Versions will quickly follow for other platforms including the iPhone, Android, etc, and other languages.

Campaigns: We discovered that there was a bug in our software that allowed people to sign up twice from the same email address – this has now been fixed.  This may also help speed up the system — and we’ll be making several other small tweaks to the code to make it work faster and more efficiently.  We launched a new campaign on Peru; publicity and translations begin today. A new campaign, just over the horizon, deals with Italy.  We have several more in the pipeline.  I’ve followed up about three campaigns that this week have reached the two-month mark (Turkey, Kazakhstan and Italy), asking our partners if they should be closed or if we can somehow reawaken interest in them.  We now have a way to show supporters which campaigns they’ve signed up to and which ones they’ve missed – this is now highlighted in the email they receive when they send off a campaign message and will be included elsewhere in our system.  The goal is to get our supporters to sign up to even more campaigns. I’ve given our Korean translator direct access to input campaigns, and have asked for a translation of the news as well.  There have been a couple of small tweaks to the campaign design – there is now a required field for the photo (and no longer a need to code in the HTML to display it); also, it’s now easier to input partner information as the HTML is now displayed.

News: While we set up the Dutch platform successfully, the Norwegian one caused problems.  I’ve now made the changes which I think will allow our Norwegian correspondents to see an interface in their language – we’ll test this tomorrow.  This already works in English, Russian and French.

Fundraising: I’ve been doing a lot of work on global and British unions; we’ve gotten some good commitments to donations this year but have a lot more work to do.  I’ll give a full report later on.

Survey: We completed the second annual survey of trade union use of the net and began publicity of the results.  I’ll be making the full survey results public later this week.  This was our largest and most successful survey ever, and we learned a lot.   We also added several hundred new people to our mailing list.

Conference 2012: An organizing committee has been formed in Sydney and they are due to meet soon. We are all using Basecamp to share a calendar, to-do lists, messages and documents (writeboards).  All the members of the committee as well as Derek and myself have logged in and used the system.

I think we have a version of the app ready for launch – but a limited launch, with the following conditions:

• This app should be launched for the iPad first.  The iPad doesn’t require us to shrink the size of our campaigns pages – they fit neatly on an iPad screen.  We can work on a small-screen friendly version of the campaigns in the meanwhile.
• This requires a bit of live testing – according to the forums on Conduit Mobile, the tool we’re using to create the app, the biggest problem is actually resolved only when the app is native – in other words, comes from the Apple App Store.  That problem is this: when you click on a campaign, or any other link to a web page, there is no Back button.  Here’s a discussion of this problem on the Conduit forum.
• The app will be English only with a commitment to roll out other languages in the next versions.

What do you all think?

It happens to the best of us – we don’t always remember to sign up to every single LabourStart campaign.

And we know what we have some campaigns with 9,477 supporters while others languish with only 2,989 people backing them.  So how do we bridge that gap?  How do we remind those 6,488 people that they’ve missed a campaign without sending them constant reminders by email?

Here’s how:

http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/solidarityforever/mycampaigns.cgi?email=labourstart@gmail.com&langcode=en

Just change the address in that URL to your own address to see how it works.

I’m going to embed this information wherever we can in the next few days.

Right now, there’s a very simple version of it at work — when you send off a message in English, you get an email back confirming what you’ve sent.

It now includes this text at the bottom:

*** NEW! *** Which campaigns have I participated in?  Which ones did I miss?
Click here to find out:
http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/solidarityforever/mycampaigns.cgi?email=labourstart@gmail.com&langcode=en

The participant’s email address — in this case, my gmail address — is automatically embedded in the URL.

In future, I want to show the actual list which that script displays in the email message and also on the final screen they see when they completed the campaign.  And of course I’ll want to do versions in other languages — but I want the English one sorted first.

I hope that this will boost support across all the campaigns.

This campaign is going live now, but I’m holding off for a bit on publicity because one of the two corporate email addresses has bounced, and we have no news on LS nor on the union’s own website, about this struggle.

Once those two issues have resolved, we’ll push this out for translation and publicyt.

We’ve just completed the second annual survey of trade union use of the net and by any measure it was a huge success. I think we’ve learned a lot — and now we need to apply the lessons we’re learning.

Last year’s survey was relatively large (for us) with 1,336 respondents; this year, we got more than twice that number — 2,954.

And last year we did the survey in English only; this year we did both English and French versions.

Full results of the survey are now available here.  You will need a password to view them; email me for it.

Here are some highlights:

WHO RESPONDED TO THE SURVEY

First of all, who responded? The English survey which had 2,605 responses, came largely from these countries (numbers in parentheses are from last year):

UK 670 (260), Canada 493 (236), USA 405 (243), Australia 319 (167), New Zealand 83 (39) and Ireland 72 (45).

Most respondents to the French survey came from:
Canada 127, France 72, and Belgium 66.

Here are the responses to key questions:

HOW WE ACCESS THE NET

The biggest change since last year is the massive jump – more than a tripling – of those using tablets, with another huge jump in the number of smartphone users. With one in seven people surveyed now using a table computer to access the net, it means that unions should take that into account, creating either websites which are suited for a tablet display, or apps specifically designed to run on Android or iOS. Unions in Francophone countries seem to lag behind on this matter – for now.

Devices used to access the net:

(The first number is from the 2012 survey in English. The number in parentheses are from the 2011 survey. The number after that is from the 2012 survey in French.)

Desktop computer 77.7% (79.2%) 79%
Laptop, notebook or netbook 68.5% (70.8%) 64.6%
Smartphone 41.6% (31.4%) 21%
Tablet 14.3% (4.3%) 9.3%
Other 2.3% (2.6%) 3.1%

As for browsers, Internet Explorer’s share continues to fall, but there was also a significant fall for Firefox. The big winners are Chrome and Safari. Unions must take into account that websites designed to work on Internet Explorer on desktop PCs that do not render in correctly in other browsers are a problem. We are back in one sense to the 1990s when there were different browsers (remember Netscape?) that we needed to design for. Union websites must be tested on multiple browsers and on multiple devices (desktop computer, tablet, phone).

Web browsers used:

Microsoft Internet Explorer 63.7% (67.1%) 59.5%
Mozilla Firefox 45.4% (51.5%) 47.6%
Google Chrome 36.5% (26.7%) 32.7%
Safari 23.4% (18.6%) 16%
Other 4.6% (5.2%) 4.4%
Opera 3.4% (4.8%) 3.4%
Konqueror 0.3% (0.6%) 0.3%

SOCIAL NETWORKS

Facebook remains the king here, but a surprise was the sudden jump in use of LinkedIn by trade unionists, with more than one in three now saying they use it. This is not the case with Francophones, who hardly use it at all. Twitter experienced a big gain — though this is not reflected in the French survey. UnionBook suffered a sharp decline in the last year. Social networks which used to compete on Facebook’s terrain such as MySpace, Orkut and Bebo now combined represent less than one tenth of Facebook’s reach. Second Life, for which some unions once invested a great deal of time and money, seems to have evaporated. In next year’s survey, we’ll make sure to include Google+ — which is clearly a hit among Francophone trade unionists, with more than one in four of them using it.

Members of which social networks:

Facebook 88.1% (88.1%) 77.6%
LinkedIn 37.5% (29.1%) 8.3%
Twitter 37.4% (32.5%) 15.4%
YouTube 35.3% (36.2%) 31.1%
UnionBook 24.1% (56%) 1.8%
Flickr 10.9% (13.5%) 1.3%
Other 10.3% (10.3%) 14%
MySpace 6.3% (11.4%) 2.2%
Second Life 1.6% (2.1%) 0.4%
Bebo 1.3% (1.2%) 0.4%
Orkut 0.5% (2%) —

Only asked in the French survey:

Google+ 27.6%

Participate in specifically trade union groups in these social networks:

Yes 56.2% (63.7%) 58.3%
No 43.8% (36.3%) 41.7%

Your union has a presence in the networks you belong to?

Yes 58% (58.8%) 57.9%
No 13.6% (15.4%) 17.6%
Don’t know 28.3% (25.7%) 24.5%

Unions are making more use of Facebook and Twitter than before, and this is true for both English and French speaking countries. Union use of LinkedIn appears to be quite limited, despite the very large number of trade unionists signed up to this social network. Unions should consider forming groups on LinkedIn and using it as an additional publishing platform, as well as discussion forum. As the French survey shows, Google+ is playing a significant role, with quite a few unions — at least in Francophone countries — now using it.

Social networks where your union has a presence

Facebook 90.2% (86.6%) 85.1%
Twitter 42.1% (33.5%) 28%
YouTube 24.6% (24.7%) 21.1%
UnionBook 10.5% (21.7%) 1.7%
Other 7.8% (9.3%) 15.4%
LinkedIn 7.7% (4.9%) 4.6%
MySpace 1.3% (2.4%)

Only asked in the French survey:

Google+ 9.1%

UNION WEBSITES

As one would suspect, nearly all national unions have websites, but as we will see, only one in five respondents visits them daily — and that number fell considerably in the last year.

National union has a website?

Yes 91.7% (92.9%) 90.4%
No 3.6% (3.3%) 4.1%
Don’t know 4.8% (3.8%) 5.5%

How often do you visit it?

Sometimes 67.2% (64.1%)
Daily 21.2% (27.1%) 26.4%
Never 11.7% (8.8%) 8.3%

Only asked in the French survey:

Weekly 29.2%
Monthly 6.9%

How would you rate it?

Good 49.8% (50.9%) 57.6%
Average 27.7% (26%) 22.9%
Excellent 13.3% (13.7%) 12.2%
Fair 4.8% (6.1%) 6.5%
Poor 4.4% (3.3%) 0.8%

LOCAL UNIONS AND THE NET

The story with local and branch unions is somewhat different. Far fewer of them seem to have websites. In many cases, people don’t know if they do. And they visit them rarely, with a significant number saying they never visit them at all. Clearly unions must make additional efforts to improve the quality of local union websites to bring them up to the level of the national sites.

Local branch union has a website?

Yes 51.6% (54.5%) 53.5%
No 33.7% (35%) 32.6%
Don’t know 14.6% (10.5%) 13.9%

How often do you visit it?

Sometimes 53.7% (53.4%) 20.8%
Never 32.5% (28.1%) 27.8%
Daily 13.8% (18.5%) 18.5%

Only asked in the French survey:

Weekly 21.3%
Monthly 11.6%

How would you rate it?

Good 37.8% (36.6%) 46.6%
Average 28% (29.9%) 29.2%
Poor 14.6% (13.1%) 7.3%
Excellent 11.4% (8.8%) 12.4%
Fair 8.3% (11.6%) 4.5%

APPS FOR SMARTPHONES AND TABLES

In spite of the huge jump in the numbers of trade unionists using smartphones and tablets, there has hardly been an increase in the union presence on these devices. And the ratings given by those who do use existing union apps are quite low — one in three in the English speaking survey rating their union app as fair or poor, and fully 41% of those responding to the French survey rating the union app as poor. We seem to back to the mid-1990s when union websites were often quite poor, especially when compared to other websites then coming on the scene. Union apps need to match other, similar apps in quality. In other words, it’s not enough to invest in creating an app. The app must be useful for members.

Your union has an app for smartphones or tablets?

Yes 5.8% (4.5%) 4.6%
No 38.1% (42.5%) 46.6%
Don’t know 56.1% (53%) 48.8%

If your union has an app, do you use it?

No 82% (83.9%) 83%
Yes 18% (16.1%) 17%

How would you rate it?

Average 28.4% (22.8%)
Poor 27.6% (27.6%) 41.4%
Good 25.8% (31.5%) 13.8%
Excellent 12.9% (11%) 3.4%
Fair 5.3% (7.1%) —

EMAIL NEWSLETTERS

Unions in both the French and English surveys, over both years, make wide use of email newsletters and members seem largely satisfied with these. Unions should never underestimate the importance of these messages. While investing in the latest social media fad (like Second LIfe) may seem ‘cool’, members want to receive information in their email inboxes and unions must continue to invest in getting this right.

You receive regular email messages from your union?

Yes 78.1% (78.8%) 83.8%
No 21.9% (21.2%) 16.2%

How would you rate those messages?

Good 55.8% (54.2%) 57.9%
Excellent 21.7% (21.7%) 25.2%
Average 16.3%(18.2%) 12.8%
Fair 3.2% (3.7%) 2.5%
Poor 3% (2.2%) 1.7%

MULTIMEDIA

Members seem pleased with video and audio content produced by their unions. Though it appears that barely half of all unions produce multimedia for the net, despite the widespread use of broadband connections which make this accessible to all.

Union produces multimedia content for the net?

Yes 54.7% (57%) 54.7%
Don’t know 27.6% (20.6%) 18.6%
No 17.7% (20.6%) 26.7%

How would you rate that content?

Good 50.5%( 50.1%) 59.8%
Excellent 22.2% (17.9%) 18.9%
Average 19.2% (24.3%) 15.2%
Poor 4.8% (4.6%) 3%
Fair 3.4% (3.1%) 3%

USEFUL SITES AND SERVICES

Of the five sites we named last year, four declined in popularity — with the decline of UnionBook being quite dramatic. (Only LabourStart held its own.) Radio Labour also fell by half, and is now only rated as useful by 6% of respondents. In some cases, I’m convinced that respondents were checking out these sites for the first time — we gave the URLs as part of the survey. It’s great to see that more than a third found the ILO website useful, but it’s hard to believe that they were regular visitors to it before the survey. One hopes that the survey will raise the awareness of great sites like Radio Labour, UnionJobs and the Global Labour Column, and that next year we might see these increase in popularity.

Useful pro-union websites and services

(Not asked in this form on the French survey)

LabourStart 94.7% (93.3%)
ILO 34%
UnionBook 21.8% (48%)
ITUC 20.8%
Global Unions 13.4%
UnionJobs 10.2% (15.2%)
Union Communication Services 7% (12.9%)
Radio Labour 6.3% (12.5%)
New Unionism Network 5.7%
Global Labour Column 4.5%

-end-