SAVE OUR ROYAL MAIL - LAUNCH OF COALITION

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CWU.org
10 April 2013

LTB 230/13 - SAVE OUR ROYAL MAIL – LAUNCH OF COALITION



No: 230/13


Ref: GS 18.9


Date: 9 April 2013







To: All Branches



Dear Colleague

SAVE OUR ROYAL MAIL - LAUNCH OF COALITION

As previously announced, the union is building a coalition to campaign to Save Our Royal Mail. Our partners in managing the coalition, PSA Communications, have started bringing together other supportive organisations. Currently, this includes Countryside Alliance, Royal National Institute of the Blind and the National Pensioners Convention and PSA are in discussion with other influential organisations.

The Coalition has been formed around 6 principles. These are aimed at encouraging organisations to join the coalition whilst remaining in line with CWU's key aims. These principles are:

Prices will shoot up
Small businesses will suffer
The countryside will be left isolated
Free postal services to the blind under threat?
HM Forces postal lifeline scrapped
Royal Mail's heritage lost

On Monday 8th April 2013, the coalition formally launched. The launch commenced with an announcement of the intentions of the coalition and a key story on the threat to rising prices for consumers from privatisation. You may have seen the article on the front page of Monday's Daily Telegraph regarding the threat of the £1 stamp. In addition the launch had significant coverage nationally and locally. These included Mail Online, AOL Money, the Morning Star and the Daily Express on the first morning and many other publications following the story up later in the day. Many regional news outlets carried interviews with the coalition.

In addition, the coalition launched its website saveourroyalmail.org

This is the website we need to drive traffic to. It includes collecting contact details so that we can build a database of supporters as well as providing a vehicle for people to write to individual MP's. All of our national SORM campaign material will carry links to this site as does, cwu.org

Finally, the coalition launched the first e-petition. This is linked to rising prices and is in the name of the campaign. This will be followed by 5 more petitions and we are looking at nominating 5 individuals to lead those. This petition is directly linked from saveourroyalmail.org and can also be found at the online petition site, change.org by browsing the search facility on that site.

Yesterday also saw the launch of the Facebook group, ‘save our royal mail', the twitter account, @saveourRM and hashtag #saveourroyalmail . Branches should maximise social media activity.

These campaign initiatives will remain live and will be promoted through our own communications.

Further updates on the coalition campaign will follow.

Any enquiries on this LTB should be addressed to the General Secretary's Office quoting reference GS 11.0

Yours sincerely



BILLY HAYES
General Secretary

DAVE WARD
Deputy General Secretary (Postal)