The week in review – 29 May – 10 June
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 …
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I have a couple of people here regularly feeding me events for the database. OK to give them the URL for the events page and have them enter items directly?
Yes, absolutely. The link is on the home page now anyway. They won’t be entering the events — they’ll be sending them to us to decide. Only senior correspondents at the moment can access the page to add events. This is the link to share:
http://www.labourstart.org/2013/suggestevent.php
Eric
Thanks, distributing.
On a campaign-related point: it’s interesting to see the often quite lengthy delay between when a mailing goes out and when some of the recipients actually act on it.
Where are on the main page is it? And as an aside, the menu at the foot of the page is experiencing wrap-around problems. 🙂
The link to suggest an event appears under the list of events.