Unions ITUC and UNI Global Union and were running a joint "Free Lula" campaign to show solidarity with (then) ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (aka Lula) of Brazil who had been jailed on suspicious charges and thus disqualified from re-running for president.
Since Lula could not access email in prison, PostBug allowed supporters to send postcards/letters to his prison in Brazil expressing solidarity with Lula that could be received.
The #Lulalivre campaign was run in four languages (English, Spanish, French and Portuguese) and thus had separate PostBug action pages for each language. ITUC and UNI Global Union each operated their coalition in a decentralised way and thus each had four language pages, but they shared the images and message text while having different permission statements and completion emails and pages.
They also had different budgets for their campaigns, but the budget was dynamic across their four language versions and thus re-allocated as necessary to keep a free sending option available on all versions.
As their email lists were smaller than usual due to a GDPR clear out. These people were mainly a few thousand national union staff and global union subscribers – likely policy professionals, academics, journalists and union allies.
They were also holding a global conference in the UK and after Lula's protégé and successor Dilma Rousseff spoke, the ‘Free Lula’ action was launched to conference participants.
UNI Global Union ended up getting supporters to send almost 500 postcards while ITUC had about 350 supporters send postcards to Lula.
The conference action didn’t result in many postcards sent partly because there were competing calls-to-action after Dilma Rousseff spoke, and partly because the Internet at the conference venue wasn’t very reliable.
ITUC/UNI Global Union banner: #FreeLula #Lulalivre
