12:00 P.M. (ET) | 2-hour session
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Starbucks workers celebrate union win. [Photo: Joshua Bessex (AP)]
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. 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 building a strong union. 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 of current and prospective union members? What are the limits of this approach? Explore how A.I. tools can help you create more effective messaging and audience segmentation.
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 helping us prepare for negotiations, to understanding and summarizing legal briefs and new regulations, to preparing grievances – how can new A.I. tools help improve our workflows as unionists? How can they help us in thinking through our strategies and tactics? What are the limitations of this new technology? We’ll explore how union staff are using A.I. tools to improve processes. You’ll learn about the variety of tools that are available 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 union staff 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.
Primary Instructor
Hannah O’Rourke, SMT Staff Partner
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 analyse and understand campaigning. She was formerly the director of Labour Together. She has worked in political organising and campaigns for over 10 years with a foundation in political organising 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
March 11 | 12:00 P.M. (ET) | 2-hour session
Find your time zone here. Training will be recorded for those in time zones that don’t facilitate live participation.
Feedback from the June 2023 A.I. session
- “Provided some pretty amazing and groundbreaking tools to support progressives, which are often undertooled.”
- “The demonstrations were super helpful. For example, the ChatGPT was awesome to see and how it worked. I found that working through the programs the most useful and helpful.”
- “Very helpful. It seems less daunting now to put these tools to work in our progressive advocacy campaigns.”
- “A great training that both brought me up to speed on AI, … and challenged me to better understand the AI landscape and its potential!”
- “This was incredibly helpful and I look forward to experimenting with some of the tools that were showcased.”
- “I absolutely loved it and it gave me the spark I needed to come out of my burnout to come up with some new toolkits and campaigns as well as work smarter not harder!”
Cost
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. Consultants & agency staff who register will have their registrations refunded. Alternatively, on demand trainings are available to all on SMT’s course platform.
| Cost | Regular | Early Bird (before February 15) |
|
| All groups with budgets of $1M+ | $190 | $180 | $170 |
| North America, Western Europe budgets below $1M | $170 | $150 | $120 |
| Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, MENA, Latin America, Oceania, budgets below $1M | $115 | $105 | $80 |
Groups referred by outreach partners can get discounts on available training programs (see table above). Please name the outreach partner in your registration and forward the email you received to [email protected]. The outreach partner discount does not apply to group rates or 2nd person rates, which are already steeply discounted. Outreach partners pass along opportunities for training and coaching to lists of organizing groups. This helps SMT as a non-profit reach more groups that could organize more powerfully with SMT support.
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; national unions on behalf of their local affiliates; State Federations, Labor Councils etc.
Testimonials
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 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.
SMT’s coaching, strategy and implementation support has been invaluable to help us become more effective online. They understand the labor movement, speak organizing, and are cost-effective.Love it!” (mobile optimization of TheStand.org)The IAM's leadership is committed to expanding the union's effective use of social media and online tools in our organizing. As part of that, we're encouraging not only full-time organizers, but also local communicators to enroll in SMT's digital campaigning program.Very thorough and helpful overview of tools and concepts for effective digital organizing.Great course, I have learned a lot.
A comprehensive look at must-have social media tools and techniques to build capacity and power for your union. We were able to effectively put together an action plan and deploy techniques like tweet storms almost as soon as we learned about them.SMT helped us build an integrated, strategic approach to a union contract campaign. SMT’s work is sophisticated and flexible–their support was invaluable.The class was great; a little advanced for me but I learned a lot.We’ve encouraged someone from every local to attend SMT’s program...Any successful campaign we have - organizing, bargaining or movement building - has to include social media as a key component.We hired SMT to lead a discussion about online strategy with some of our union’s staff. It rekindled my desire and commitment to using emerging technologies in my organizing!I found the Advanced CRM curriculum extremely helpful, in that it deepened my understanding of the capacity of the CRM we use. The practical examples were really helpful. We’ve begun to build some of the best practices from the Advanced CRM curriculum into our planning and internal workflows for 2019.We want to be able to be as smart and effective as we can with our limited resources...SMT is a no-brainer.SMT’s staff is friendly, flexible, competent, creative…Efficiently implemented cutting-edge strategies and designed great-looking materials to communicate our message to our members. I’ll come back to SMT in a heartbeat.I learned really useful tools that are coming in handy in my everyday job.I loved this course. It gave me a sense of what's out there. Before this, I didn't know what I didn't know! The session on geofencing blew my mind. These tools are critical for our organizing.[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. Our local switched CRMs earlier this year and having SMT staff walk through the features and answer questions was extremely helpful, both in problem solving and in providing some ideas in how I can use our CRM as a better organizing tool for our local. If you have any questions about your CRM, it is worth it!All of SMT training is packed and powerful!A fast paced course that provides a lot of interesting and useful information in a short amount of time.
