For BIPOC staff involved in campaigns
Are you a BIPOC social justice campaigner or staffer looking to deepen your leadership and responsibility in campaigns?
Photo credit: Gerry Lauzon, Flickr
Do you lead an organization that seeks to fill more senior campaign roles with BIPOC campaigners and want to lay the groundwork for existing staff members to fill these roles?
This fellowship is designed to support BIPOC staffers to take on greater responsibility in strategy development, management, and implementation of integrated online/offline campaigns. Ideal candidates for this fellowship can fill a range of roles in movement work: communications, field, organizing, fundraising, volunteer leadership, and more. The fellowship supports participants to become next-level online/offline campaign staff combining time-tested organizing with the latest tools, tactics, and skills, including managerial skills.
Duration: 3.5 months, March – June 2024
Location: entirely online
Cost: $3500 per person (Scholarship assistance is available based on funds raised. We will work hard with each accepted candidate and their organization to make it possible for them to attend. Apply as early as possible if you think you will need scholarship aid.)
Program outline
- Achieve Advanced Certification in SMT’s Digital Campaigning Certificate Program. Time commitment: 3-hour class once a week, plus 2-3 hours per week to complete assignments over this 10-week period (April – June 2024). Topics cover:
- Organizing strategy and tactics connecting online and offline power, including direct action tactics, and building an effective activist pipeline
- Social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, live streaming, building online communities, and online ads
- Outreach tools, including email, WhatsApp, and mobile messaging
- Making content that drives action via personal & public narrative, graphic design, and video
- Systems and infrastructure to run an effective campaign, including metrics, website, email, and CRM/member database/action tools
- Periodic support meetings with your peer buddy, and with your mentor
- Special fellowship sessions and assignments held in March and June will include 3-4 of the following (and other possible topics) based on interest:
- Online/Offline Campaign strategy, including in coalitions
- Ad campaign strategy and practice
- Effective hiring and supervision practices, with special emphasis on hiring and supervising digital staff
- Campaign and team management, with special emphasis on tool options and team implementation best practices, as well as managing up and laterally
- Building cohesiveness among departments such as comms, field/organizing, digital, development and executive leadership
- Managing contractors to get their best work
- Reading and discussion of important recent books on organizing
- Each Fellow will:
- develop and lead a training on a core topic, and lead a coaching session to share a specific skill, with other participants as trainees
- practice giving and getting feedback in these sessions
- make a self-development plan with next steps
Staffing
Coordinator: Kenyatta Muzzanni
Kenyatta Muzzanni (she/they) lives at the intersection of organizing and the arts, having been a participant in social movements and a writer since they were young. As Director of Organizing for the Katal Center for Equity, Health and Justice, they waged campaigns in New York and Connecticut against mass incarceration and for justice in the legal system, developing and implementing campaign strategy and training organizers. Kenyatta played an instrumental role in the #LessIsMoreNY campaign, which resulted in the most transformative parole reform legislation in the country to date. A graduate of SMT’s intensive Digital Campaigning Certificate Program, Kenyatta is responsible for the BIPOC Organizers Fellowship and fundraising for SMT’s Africa movement activist training and coaching.
Instructors and mentors:
SMT’s regular team members, supplemented by additional experienced BIPOC online/offline campaigners
Eligibility
- Be a BIPOC campaigner (involved in campaigns regardless of your title)
- Be able to commit to an average of 5-6 hours/week to sessions and assignment completion over the six months
- You should have a significant role in a campaign that involves some sort of offline action (direct actions, electoral work, events, etc.) It does not have to be your full-time work. You do need to be able to implement what you’re learning and share from your experience in real campaigns.
- You may be based anywhere in the world. However, you must be available for live sessions, which will be held within this time block: 11 am – 2 pm (EST).
- This program is not for consultancies or agencies. It is for staff of NGOs/non-profits. You may also be an unpaid officer of an organization, who works on campaigns extensively.
Application Process
- Scholarship application: Oct 16, 2023 deadline for the best chance of a partial scholarship, sooner is better
- Application deadline: Dec 15, 2023
- Notifications of acceptance January 5, 2023
- Payment is required by January 15, 2023
Testimonials
The trainings are terrific–geared for every level of experience. And being rooted in social change movement, especially helpful to organizers.
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. We’re starting our third straight year providing grantee partners with Social Movement Technologies training and coaching…our grantees are in good hands.We’ve heard really good things from our grantee partners. SMT has a strong, grantee-focused way of working.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.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!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.
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 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 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!I strongly recommend SMT. Their strong organizing background, preparation and thoughtfulness made our strategy assessment with them enjoyable and really helpful.
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.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 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!We have had a fantastic experience with SMT…they have been highly responsive to the needs of our grantees.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.
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.
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 pricesSMT 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.
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 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'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 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 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 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.
