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Social Movement Technologies
Social Movement Technologies collaborates with campaigners and activists around the world to build people power for justice in the digital age. It provides organizing strategy, training and campaign support.
SMT is a non-profit. What does this mean? SMT is a movement support group, driven 100% to meet movement needs.
The United States Internal Revenue Service requires that SMT have a for-profit subsidiary to deal with c4 and c5 groups (mostly unions). That entity is part of the non-profit and any profits at the end of the year are allocated by the board to further the overall mission of SMT.
As SMT develops, our aim is for it to be guided by, and be accountable to, the broader social change community it serves. Our goal is to be effective at the lowest possible cost in order to be accessible and useful to all organizing groups.
SMT is unionized. Once a staff member has worked 10 hours, they join the staff union–The Pacific Media Guild/CWA’s Freelancer’s Division. We’re proud to be part of the Communication Workers of America, a progressive union whose members are building the labor movement for workplace rights and dignity for all.
SMT Movement Values Statement. SMT invites people to join its trainings and online support spaces who share, and are working within organizations that share, common values of justice for all. SMT spaces seek to support struggles against racism, colonialism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, ableism, classism, and other harmful systems. We mention explicitly a few here that are important to SMT. Groups and individuals that support this set of values are welcome to participate in trainings and online support spaces.
SMT may use additional criteria in deciding to provide coaching and direct campaign support to groups. For example, SMT will not provide coaching or direct campaign support to Israeli groups unless they explicitly support the full right of return for refugees and an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Although we recognize that many Israeli groups are doing good work, SMT takes this position to avoid normalizing Israel’s apartheid policies.
We want to connect. Email us! or call 203-514-0327.
We’ve heard really good things from our grantee partners. SMT has a strong, grantee-focused way of working.
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.
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.
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.I really liked the A.I. custom training session, especially the parts tailored to our workstream and with examples pulled from our staff. It really helped to situate the tools in our work and open our team's minds to the possibilities.We have had a fantastic experience with SMT…they have been highly responsive to the needs of our grantees.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 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!
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 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 coaching was incredibly supportive, encouraging and accessible. SMT had a huge impact on evolving La Semilla's storytelling program. Through SMT coaching, we diversified our digital communications. Having SMT as a source of resources and as a thought partner has been incredibly impactful to our work. 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.We’re starting our third straight year providing grantee partners with Social Movement Technologies training and coaching…our grantees are in good hands.
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.I strongly recommend SMT. Their strong organizing background, preparation and thoughtfulness made our strategy assessment with them enjoyable and really helpful.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!The trainings are terrific–geared for every level of experience. And being rooted in social change movement, especially helpful to organizers.
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.
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.
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.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!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.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.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!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 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.
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