Given a choice between having a website or an electronic mailing list, I always tell people to choose the mailing list.
The web is a fanastic tool — don’t get me wrong. But there’s nothing like email when you want to do online campaigning.

And the reason for this is quite simple. If you want people to do something that you mention only on your website, they have to first of all come to your website.
But with email, the message comes to them. We don’t always remember to visit certain websites. But we all read — or at least skim — our email.
Email is the ultimate ‘push’ technology, to recycle a phrase that was popular several years back. Every major news site understands this, and they will all go to great lengths to get your email address.
But unions have been incredibly lax in getting their members’ email addresses. Unions that have had websites for years, that have invested enormous sums in the new communications technologies, often don’t use email, the oldest, simplest and yet most powerful of those technologies.
I was talking the other day with people who work for one of the largest unions in Britain. The union has around 700,000 members. Of these the union has email addresses for something like 4,000. That means that more than 99% of the union’s members cannot be reached by email.
In Canada, I was stunned to discover last year that some of the largest unions not only don’t have email addresses for members, but in fact don’t maintain a membership list of any kind. (All the information is in the hands of the local unions.)
US unions which are campaigning online have been quick to discover that the lack of email addresses of members is the Achille’s Heel of trade union campaigning online.
How do we get members’ email addresses? First of all, ’email’ has got to be a field on membership application forms. Amazingly, many unions still recruit new members without asking for their email addresses.
But what to do about members who joined some time ago, before email addresses became common? Those members need to be persuaded to revealing their email addresses to the union. One obvious way to do this is to offer reduced dues. Union members who agree to receive most communications electronically, rather than on paper, should pay less — reflecting the reduced costs to the union.
But it’s not enough to merely collect email addresses. Those addresses need to be tightly integrated with the union’s membership database. Want to do a mass mailing to the union’s female members? You need to have a ‘gender’ field in the database. Want to write only to members who work in bookshops? ‘Employer type’ has to be a field in the database.
An intelligent integration of the union’s membership database with its email lists can allow extremely targeted mailings, mobilizing members to attend regional or sectoral events, for example.
Of course all this is meaningless if the union doesn’t then use the email addresses.
I worked with one union which managed to collect thousands of email addresses, but then when we tried to do regular mass mailings, it turned out that no one had a clue what it was we wanted to say. In the end, the mailing list fell into disuse.
LabourStart has had a mailing list since 1998, and today has close to 15,000 email addresses of trade unionists from around the world on that list.
Every week, we send out a mailing to those people which includes a number of regular features. These include a regular ‘labour website of the week’ — and we make sure to include the web address (URL) of the winner in the text of the message so that you can click through to the winning website. Another feature is almost always an online campaign of one kind or another. We use the weekly mailing to update readers about new features on the website as well.
We try to keep our mailings brief and to the point. If there’s more to say, we include a link to a web page with more information.
The mailings are always text-only — we never send out messages as HTML (web pages), which many people cannot see properly on their computers.
Finally, we make it very easy for people to unsubscribe, with an explanation at the bottom of every mass mailing.
Given a choice between a website and a mailing list I’d always choose the mailing list. Fortunately, that’s a choice you’ll never have to make. The key to successful online campaigning for trade unions is to use both tools together.
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This article was published in Industrial Worker.