Social Movement Technologies

A non-profit/NGO providing organizing strategy, training and campaign support to build people power and win in the digital age.

What support do you need?

I want to become more skilled and powerful in my online campaigning or activism.
We need training, strategy, or implementation help to reach more people, engage them more deeply, and amplify our collective voice so it is heard more clearly.
I’m a progressive funder who wants to connect grantees with high-quality digital campaigning training and support.
I’m a skilled digital campaigner. I want to connect with peers and mentor others.

SMT’s Impact Over Its First 10 years

Providing organizing strategy, training and campaign support to build progressive power and win in the digital age.

Staff and activists of 4,900+ groups
have engaged with SMT trainings

Testimonials

SMT’s training on using WhatsApp to activate our bases helped us activate more leaders by creating conversational WhatsApp groups for members and assigning different leadership roles to volunteers.
The SMT trainings I’ve taken have helped us mobilize and deepen engagement in our communities. Through Twitterstorms, phone banking, and other tactics that I learned through SMT’s trainings, we succeeded in our call to #ExtendtheReg for a million young people who would otherwise be disenfranchised by anti-poor COVID policies.

Our staff took a lot of SMT courses – including the intensive Digital Campaigning Certificate Program. It helped us take our digital campaigning and collectivizing actions to the next level! We used various tools to increase our follower base and successfully target authorities to take action at the village and municipal levels in India.

SMT's training helped me use my journalistic skills effectively to highlight people's struggles and create change. Using Twitter more effectively, we supported Syria's refugee camp hospital to get more media attention and raise funds to respond to the hospital's needs as well as build visibility on the issues affecting refugees.
Working with SMT was easy and collaborative. The training helped our Greenpeace Southeast Asia team get new insights into campaign best practices across the globe.
Having access to experts through the certificate program was amazing. The course is so practical. I set up google ads for the first time and created our digital security policy and implementation plan. Our whole team uses the campaign strategy template now. Now we know how to improve our email deliverability and started a texting program.
I took the workers organizing in the digital age training. We really need this kind of training in Finland, which people in the US have had access to for some years. The training was effective to start organizing for instance on Twitter.
I implemented lessons on personal narrative, public narrative and emails directly into my campaign, so this was an instant gratification. I loved learning from the other Digital Campaigning Certificate Program participants who came from around the world, working on different topics.
The program gave my team the tools and time to strategise how our grassroots migrant organising translates to a digital context. I picked up tools like source codes, which then enabled us to see that more people were registering from Instagram than through any other platform and caused us to adapt our strategy. We also became SMT an Outreach Partner to enable our network to benefit from trainings at lower prices
The Design Apprenticeship course helped me become bolder in my design choices. I became confident enough to push for a more systemic approach to design in the team, developing templates and guiding other creative colleagues. This program was pivotal in my development as a designer!
We’re starting our third straight year providing grantee partners with Social Movement Technologies training and coaching…our grantees are in good hands.
I found a lot of value in this Certificate Program that I use in my everyday work: from using social media effectively; significantly growing accounts and activating people online, pressuring targets in campaigns, and running Twitterstorms. Even when using other tools, I still apply the principles I learned!
This was a fantastic training experience and I learned a lot about emerging technology with lots of support!
Our coach was an everyday reminder of what we needed to do. He checked in and followed up on us. It really helped us activate Twitter in our campaigns and tighten up digital security. We moved from just having a Twitter handle to building on a hashtag that saw a jailed human rights activist released from prison.
This is great for C3's to understand what they SHOULD be doing during elections. I think there is much more space for C3s to take the GOTV initiative.
I got a LOT out of it...the idea that comms can be used not just to “raise the visibility” of my organization, but to build power -- to move people, engage them, get them to do something concrete to push our social justice work forward. The strategies and tools shared were super helpful, and have already had measurable impact. Staff is fantastic - knowledgeable, responsive, thoughtful, collaborative.
SMT helped us craft an effective public narrative for our campaign to get a mine closed. SMT helped us finalize a campaign strategy and come up with an effective plan to raise visibility and engage the public. Our campaign led to a pause in the mining. We will keep fighting!
SMT helped GAIA use LinkedIn to reach a key constituency we were having trouble reaching - thousands of people who play a specific role in the waste management industry. We got responses from key players.
Last year, we worked with SMT on a census campaign with Native Voice Network, and we got so much direct campaign support, one-on-one coaching. I spent a lot of time doing just one-on-one coaching support with ads. after that I felt super empowered and fearless to just navigate all these different tools in the universe. So it was a really great and helpful experience for us.
SMT is an amazing resource for starting digital organizing and communications and maintaining a program that engages members and moves them to action. There are a bunch of free and super reasonably priced webinars available so you can jump right in and focus on what you need to improve.The webinars have just been stellar. I've learned so much, especially from the Top Tools and Tactics to bump up your organizing game. I used the templates and resources to set up an editorial calendar and to track stats for our new social media channels. It was very easy to take what was presented in the training and apply it to my union immediately.
Two things I valued most about the program were lifelong access to the course materials and case study walkthroughs from some of the most compelling organizers and organizing collectives we have in the field right now.
The webinars were very thorough, and the SMT team seems very responsive, broadly knowledgeable, and intuitive. The “WhichCRM?” questionnaire was helpful when I filled it out with my team. It helped us think about the aspects of a CRM we were looking for.
The Digital Campaigning Certificate Program is a great course to get to know all the different aspects of digital campaigning. What I like most about it is the consistent focus on building power.
We hired SMT to help with some ad campaigns. Folks are professional, experienced, and communicative. Knowing what was happening at different stages helped me understand what was going on in our programs. I was never embarrassed to ask questions. The SMT staffer explained everything that would happen, why he was doing something, how he'd accomplish it, which was great. It made me feel like we were working collaboratively. SMT also provides a lot of great trainings to the progressive community to equip people and organizations to do this work on their own.
The Social Movement Technologies Digital Campaigner Certificate is an excellent opportunity for me to meet digital organizers from across the country who are doing important work fighting for social justice on digital platforms. Often times, we are isolated in our work whether it be regionally or by issue, but through this program I've learned so much about all the cool ways other organizers are engaging and building movements. I've also been able to refresh my own knowledge about digital campaigning and have learned about a ton of new technology, software, and platforms that can be used for positive social change. Thank you SMT team!
I wish SMT had existed when I started organizing in 2010! I learned many of these skills on the fly, often through trial and error. Overall it is really helpful to learn about all of the new tools which exist, especially ones that non-profits can use for low or no cost. The presentation did a great job of outlining best practices for many different scenarios.
[The Digital Campaigning Certificate Program] is a wonderful course with a great amount of information to get you started on understanding how digital can work for your own organization.
[Story-Based Strategy] was awesome. It was sort of a refresher and a reset for me as an organizer and a social worker. I took a great deal of notes.
Our staff have taken SMT’s excellent trainings over the past five years. Mastering the strategic use of digital tools is essential to advance social change online. SMT’s offerings are a much-needed and unique resource. And they are responsive and committed to meeting the needs of participants. We’re thrilled to partner on the new Global South track of their Digital Campaigning Certificate program, which is a need that we expressed and they acted on promptly. Thank you SMT!
Great information on how to make emails more impactful and spur action. Great to get direct feedback on a sample email.
I found the email coaching course to be extremely helpful. I thoroughly enjoyed that this exercise involved everyone working from the same assignment. It made the feedback that much more helpful. I think this has been one of the best SMT sessions that I've taken.
SMT is the only training I know of that speaks our language of activism and uses the tools we use everyday in the field. They are a go-to resource to help raise the bar for communications in the labor movement.
[SMT's WhichCRM tool] helped me make a side by side comparison without having to spend hours sifting through demos and websites on my own. Invaluable!
SMT coaching enabled us to expand our presence within human rights spaces in Kenya beyond an LGBTIQ audience. It helped us use Twitter to connect with allies in the environmental justice and land rights movements. It was amazing to have someone to work with who knows our work and give us templates just when we needed them.
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