A.I.-generated images used in a UK campaign to promote transparency in Parliament. Credit: H. O’Rourke
2-hour session. Find your time zone. Instruction in English. Interpretation provided as funding allows in response to registrations.
How to use A.I. for the messaging, framing and segmentation we need to build people power and win electoral, issue and union campaigns. You’ll learn how to use prompt engineering to generate messages with the right tone, refine your framing techniques and more accurately target your audience. We’ll cover how specific A.I. tools can help us improve internal workflows and processes as campaigners, and how to use image generation tools and create effective prompts.
Although A.I. tools are already proving useful in campaigning, we can’t ignore the significant ethical questions that come with using them, or the alarming ways A.I is already being used to manipulate public opinion on a mass scale. From biases built into the training data used by these models to questions of artistic and content ownership and transparency, to unprecedented opportunities for mass manipulation, there are tremendous concerns associated with A.I. This session will predominantly focus on the practical use of these tools. We will briefly discuss the organizing underway to address these issues and to hold A.I. companies accountable for how this technology develops.
What we’ll cover
Using A.I. for messaging, framing and segmentation
Winning hearts and minds through effective messaging and storytelling is a key part of campaigning. How can new large language models like Chat GPT, which predict text based on millions of sources, help us to craft such messages? How can they help us connect with different segments? What are the limits of this approach? Explore how A.I. tools can help you create more effective messaging and audience segmentation. In this interactive session, you’ll learn how to use prompt engineering to generate messages with the right tone, refine your framing techniques and more accurately target your audience.
Using A.I. for organising and workflows
New tools like Chat GPT are great at producing content but how can they help our other workflows? From generating suggestions for event formats to helping us to better manage our inboxes – how can new A.I. tools help improve our workflows as campaigners? How can they help us in thinking through our strategies and tactics? What are the limitations of this new technology? We’ll explore how people are using A.I. tools to improve processes and how this could apply to the field and practice of campaigning. You’ll learn about the variety of tools that are available to campaigners and how they can be used.
Using A.I. for design and content creation
Image generation is a key area where a number of new A.I. tools and technologies have sprung up. How can campaigners best make use of these tools? How can you craft prompts that generate the images you need? What are the limits or risks of using this technology? We’ll cover how different A.I. tools can be used to design campaign content.
Instructor
Hannah O’Rourke is a UK-based SMT team member. She is a co-founder of Campaign Lab, a community of politically-minded progressive data scientists, researchers and activists who are working together to build new election tools and change the way we analyze and understand campaigning. She was formerly the director of Labour Together. She has worked in political organizing and campaigns for over 10 years with a foundation in political organizing and coalition management. Her work has brought together data scientists, researchers, academics, policy analysts, and political campaigners together to tackle some of the most pressing strategic questions facing the Labour Party in the UK.
When
June 13, 11 a.m. ET. 2 hours. Find your time zone. Training will be recorded for those in time zones that don’t facilitate live participation.
Language Access
Instruction will be in English. Interpretation will be provided with 10+ registrants needing that language or with funder support for it.
Cost
Outreach Partner Referral Discount. Groups referred by outreach partners can make use of the Outreach Partner Referral Rate. Please name the outreach partner in your registration and forward the mass email you received to [email protected]. Outreach partners pass along opportunities for training and coaching to their network. Interested in being an outreach partner? Contact [email protected] and describe the size and type of groups you’d reach out to. Typically, this is a list of chapters of a network; allied organizations across a country, state, region; or some other cohort or grouping of many organizations.
In order to support a movement organization learning space, SMT trainings are for staff of non-profits – NGOs, unions and electoral campaigns. Trainings are not for consultants or agencies.
Enroll before May 1st to take advantage of Early Bird rates.
| COST | Regular | Early Bird (before May 15) | Outreach partner Referral |
| All groups with budgets of $1M+ | $90 | $80 | $70 |
| North America, Western Europe budgets below $1M | $75 | $65 | $50 |
| Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, MENA, Latin America, Oceania, budgets below $1M | $45 | $40 | $35 |
This training is free to staff of the 60+ groups under active coaching contracts with SMT. Just email your SMT coach.
Testimonials
We’ve heard really good things from our grantee partners. SMT has a strong, grantee-focused way of working.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!Without SMT we would not have been able to move our organizing from the field to the digital arena during COVID. They helped us set up systems, coached and trained our folks, helped us troubleshoot and launch digital outreach efforts all in crucial campaign moments. Can’t speak highly enough about what their help meant!
SMT helped us create a social media presence to expand our cannabis worker organizing campaign. Our organizers have enhanced their social media capabilities. We have succeeded beyond our expectations. Working with SMT has been a great experience. They really understand organizing and communications.
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 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.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.We have had a fantastic experience with SMT…they have been highly responsive to the needs of our grantees.
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. 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.
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!SMT has been a great partner to co-design and launch a set of offerings that meet the growing digital and remote needs of the organizations we support, including bilingual access for our Spanish-speaking partners. The team is relatable, attentive and knowledgeable and their use of case studies helps to make complex information accessible!
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.The trainings are terrific–geared for every level of experience. And being rooted in social change movement, especially helpful to organizers.I strongly recommend SMT. Their strong organizing background, preparation and thoughtfulness made our strategy assessment with them enjoyable and really helpful.We’re starting our third straight year providing grantee partners with Social Movement Technologies training and coaching…our grantees are in good hands.
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 pricesI 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!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.
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.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.
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.SMT has worked with us to develop and implement a broad and integrated social media strategy. They helped our leadership understand the importance of such a strategy and taught our activists the basic skills to execute it. From website maintenance to targeted twitter campaigns, they are there when you need them and they understand that it is all about movement building.
