Protest against racism in European refugee policy, 2022 London. Photo: Alisdare Hickson
Create ads that move people and help win campaigns. Earn SMT’s Certificate in Facebook & Instagram Ads for Organizing.
12 Sessions May 17, 2022 through June 30, 2022
Around the world, movement organizations are using digital ads to find, engage, and activate their people – from unions finding organizing leads, to Indigenous organizers finding and engaging Native voters where voter file data was lacking, to local racial justice groups generating thousands of letters to pressure local elected officials while building their base.
This 12-session Certificate in Facebook & Instagram Ads for Organizing will advance your ability to use Facebook & Instagram ads to build power, or to more effectively manage a team member or vendor running ads. From selecting the right channel, to targeting the right audience, to landing pages and building an effective pipeline, you will learn how to move people, money, and narrative with ads.
This work is especially essential given the changes in recent months and years with Facebook and Instagram ads. Changes to targeting, conversion tracking, and political ads by Facebook, Apple, and others mean that most groups need to take a more sophisticated approach than simple “boosts” to avoid wasting money. Groups working with vendors who focus on private sector digital work, television, or mail need to re-evaluate their strategies given the changes and the latest research on what works in organizing.
The curriculum will focus on Facebook & Instagram ads, which are the most time- and cost-effective tool for most organizations. One of the twelve sessions will provide a brief overview of other online ad platforms and when to consider them.
This program is for you if:
- You are part of an issue organizing, electoral group, or union that is building power to win change
- You are in a communication, organizing, or fundraising role where online ads could support your work
- You want to grow your base, attract donors, pressure targets, or shape narrative via online ads
- You want to more effectively manage vendors or team members who run ads or bring the work in-house
- You have the organizational buy-in to design and launch a real ad campaign during the course of the certificate program; with at least $200 USD in spending
In-depth Training: What we’ll cover
The 12 sessions will cover ad campaigns from scratch for beginners, but also provide intermediate practitioners with strong examples of how to refine campaigns and integrate them better into organizing. Participants will have the opportunity to break out into small groups appropriate to their level during each of the 12 sessions.
This hands-on program will require a time commitment of 3 hours/week in-session and 1-3 hours/week outside of the sessions. You will engage with existing ad campaigns and case studies from movement groups. You’ll complete four assignments that will step-by-step build an ad campaign, getting real instructor feedback. This will include refining the ad, ad targeting, and call-to-action. Then, after launching the ad, you’ll work closely with an instructor to interpret the results and further refine the campaign.
Program requirements
- Attendance: Sessions will be recorded, but you must attend 9 of the 12 required sessions (including 3 of the 4 small group sessions) to receive credit. (Exceptions can be made for people in time zones which make it impossible to attend live.)
- 1-3 hours per week to complete assignments and prep work: to process the learning, to complete assignments for each session, and to prepare your organization’s accounts to run ad campaigns (if necessary).
- Access to run campaigns: you will create multiple ad campaigns, and run at least one in order to be able to edit and improve based on the results
- Budget for ad campaigns: budget of at least $200 (not included in session cost, paid directly to the ads platform). Then, you will refine the campaign based on initial results.
Earn a Certificate in Facebook & Instagram Ads for Organizing Requirements: Attend nine out of twelve sessions; complete three out of four assignments
Participate from around the globe
Sessions will be held Tuesdays and Thursdays at this time:
9-10:30 am PST (Mexico)
12-1:30 pm EST (New York)
5-6:30 pm UTC (London)
7-8:30 pm EET (Palestine)
8-9:30pm EAT (Kenya)
10-11:30 pm IST (Mumbai)
Presentation content will be recorded.
Social Movement Technologies is committed to supporting people power around the world. The core schedule will be on Tuesdays and Thursdays at the above time, but with 10 confirmed signups from another time zone, we will launch small group critiques at times that work better for other global regions such as Oceania or Asia.
Language and Hearing Accessibility
Instruction will be in English. Simultaneous interpretation in all 18 sessions can be provided at no additional cost if at least 10 registrants prefer that language. Slides will also be provided in the translated language.
All live sessions will be live captioned and all recordings will be captioned in English and any languages with a group of 10 or more users, at no additional cost. Additional languages must be arranged ahead of time.
Instructors
Scotty Brown. Scotty (they/them) is an artist, organizer, and community builder with roots in Philadelphia, living in Washington, DC. They have worked on the Digital Team at Color Of Change since 2018, building out digital ads and grassroots video content to amplify campaigns for Black liberation. They organize with Occupation Free DC for international abolition and an end to U.S. complicity in Palestinian oppression, and they build community solidarity through Ward 1 Mutual Aid Network and their artist/activist collective. They also are a founding member of DC’s only queer Yiddish burlesque troupe, The Shmutzik Shmates.
Kevin Pujanauski, SMT North America Movement Support Lead. Kevin (he/him) focuses on using digital tools to reach and organize with community members and voters, including texting, tech-enabled relational outreach, and online ads. Kevin has supported unions, issue organizing groups, and electoral groups on dozens of ad campaigns, connecting the organizations with tens of thousands of new supporters. Kevin’s background includes issue and electoral organizing at the local and state level, from leading digital on a successful City Council campaign and supporting digital efforts for multiple campaigns in Chicago and throughout Illinois fighting mass incarceration.
Additional instructors will be announced as the start date of the training approaches.
Cost
North America or Western Europe-based organizations and activists:
$900 Pricing for groups with budgets above $1M USD, anytime
$700 Early bird pricing for payment received by April 29, 2022, when the price goes up to $800, for groups with budgets under $1M USD
$600 Additional person from the same organization (same email domain)
$5000 Group Rate (up to 10 seats) – designed to help networks and funders make this program accessible to their communities.
If based outside of North America or Western Europe:
50% discount on regular price
$400 Outside of North America and Western Europe AND group has a budget of less than $1M/year USD
$2500 Group Rate (up to 10 seats) – designed to help networks and funders make this program accessible to their communities.
Note: Organizations paying for a mix of staff based in North America/Europe and other regions can pay based on where each staffer is based.
Payment is by credit card at the below form, which includes a 4% fee. Please reach out to [email protected] if you’d like an invoice for payment by bank transfer (no fee).
Note for all: separate from the registration fee, organizations must also budget for the participant to spend $200 in ads over the course of the program, paid directly to the ads platform.
If you are paying for someone else, please indicate their name and title in the form, not yours.
Testimonials
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.
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.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.[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.Great course, I have learned a lot.Very thorough and helpful overview of tools and concepts for effective digital organizing.The class was great; a little advanced for me but I learned a lot.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.
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 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.We want to be able to be as smart and effective as we can with our limited resources...SMT is a no-brainer.Love it!” (mobile optimization of TheStand.org) 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!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.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!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.SMT helped us build an integrated, strategic approach to a union contract campaign. SMT’s work is sophisticated and flexible–their support was invaluable.I learned really useful tools that are coming in handy in my everyday job.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.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.
