Are you an advanced practitioner of online organizing? Do you want a community of peers to learn from, connect with, and act as a supportive sounding board for what is most challenging in your work? Do you want to learn best practices on advanced topics that aren’t being addressed sufficiently elsewhere?
[Not quite this advanced? SMT’s Digital Campaigning Certificate Training Program may be for you.]
Sessions will run once a month, 60-90 minutes, via video conference.
Topics will be chosen based on participant interest and could include, for example, best practices to:
- develop a strong digital department
- ramp up collaboration and enroll organizational colleagues when you run a department of 1
- bridge the digital communications-organizing silos and ensure that digital is integrated into strategy
- maximize affiliates’ and partners’ digital capacity with limited resources
- define “hub” roles effectively
- manage contractors, determine when contractors vs. internal staffing makes sense, decide between freelancers (and different sources for freelancers) and agencies
- recruit effectively and keep great staff
- practice racial justice in staffing and digital organizing practices
- manage teams and projects efficiently
- maintain a digitally secure operation and best practices to get there
- run effective multi-channel campaigns, including using modest ad buys at pivotal moments
- GOTV – including, for example, integrating field operations with social media/digital, best tech for canvassing, effective online/offline activation during and after canvass operations
- targeted P2P texting and cellular buys combined with volunteer v. paid field operations
- effective list building, practices, cost, results
- online fundraising
- budget effectively
- track metrics and present them to build understanding and support for online organizing across the organization
- one of your biggest challenges missing from this list? Let’s add it!
To participate you must:
- work for a progressive organizing group or network of groups, or a union.
- do digital organizing full-time (though your title can be anything).
- likely guide the work of additional staff, though they may not report to you.
- have 3+ years of experience doing digital organizing across multiple channels.
- be eager to participate actively in a dialogue with peers and colleagues, sharing your experience and curious about theirs.
SMT staff will:
- moderate sessions or co-moderate with members of the group who would like to take leadership on a topic
- identify outstanding practitioners of a particular topic who are willing to share their expertise as guests
- prep a topic to ensure a focused, structured discussion
- ensure that recordings and other materials are sent out (we will pause recording when participants want an off-record discussion).
Cost: TBD
Access to some powerful tools will be available to participants for a small additional fee:
- Meltwater Media Monitoring and Media outreach (full access to searches and downloads of relevant journalist contact info as well as keyword searches of traditional media and social media coverage)
- CrowdTangle Dashboard with the ability to set up daily email notifications of viral Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts based on account lists or keywords and access intelligence about comparative engagement across accounts
- unlimited access to all of SMT’s developed CrowdTangle listening lists.
If you would like to be added to an “interested” list to hear more about this group as it develops, tell us about yourself.
Testimonials
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.
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 pricesThe 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.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.
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.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!
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!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!
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 trainings are terrific–geared for every level of experience. And being rooted in social change movement, especially helpful to organizers.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.
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.We have had a fantastic experience with SMT…they have been highly responsive to the needs of our grantees.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!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’re starting our third straight year providing grantee partners with Social Movement Technologies training and coaching…our grantees are in good hands.
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 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!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 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.
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.I strongly recommend SMT. Their strong organizing background, preparation and thoughtfulness made our strategy assessment with them enjoyable and really helpful.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 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.
