Header
Social Movement Technologies
See program for Asia, Africa, Europe, MENA
Activists fight gentrification of Chinatown, Philadelphia, U.S. 2022 (Photo: Joe Piette)
Do you want to ramp up your use of online & offline tools on ambitious campaigns given limited time and resources? Want to make sure you’re not missing out on new developments in digital tools & tactics to support your work? Looking for a community of peers working through the same challenges and opportunities? Join an SMT Digital Campaigning Certificate Intensive.
This program covers all of the digital campaigning essentials. Topics cover:
Participants will get individual instructor feedback on how to apply the topic to their organizing through assignment review. Instructors are deeply experienced online/offline campaigners with real-world experience applying the tools to organizing. They span a range of backgrounds and organizing experiences.
During and after this intensive, participants and their organizations will have unlimited access to SMT’s library of 150+ hours of training, which would cost over $3,000 if purchased individually. This enables interested participants and organizations to go deeper into the above topics and cover additional topics. Additional courses in the library include in-depth treatments of texting, CRM/member database tools, Twitter, online ads including Google Ad Grants, digital security, and much more.
This program will run for 10 weeks with one 3-hour session per week.
Organizing Strategy and Tactics
Content that Drives Action
Outreach Tools
Social Media
Systems & Infrastructure
Instruction will be in English. SMT is actively seeking funder and network partners to ensure support for additional language interpretation and captioning in Spanish & Portuguese for this program. With the commitment of 20+ registrants committed by March 25th, interpretation in Spanish or Portuguese will be available at no additional cost. Please email us at [email protected] if you’re interested in additional language support. All recordings in the SMT library are captioned in English and Spanish and up to 5 other languages. In addition, course recordings include courses instructed in French, Spanish and Arabic.
See testimonials of alumni (community organizing | union) from across the world who’ve joined the program to become more effective and strategic campaigners, organizers, communicators and/or fundraisers.
Prices for the intensive range from $600-$1,750 per registrant based on the organization’s budget, location, registration time, referrals, and whether it’s a group or individual rate. This range helps us provide every registrant tailored support, including individual review of assignments and a one-hour 1:1 coaching session following the session while making the program accessible to groups across the world.
We consider this training an investment for any organization that participates! Only one person from your organization has to pay the full rate. If a member from your organization has participated in this training in the past and paid the full rate, everyone else in your organization will pay the second person rate in the future. If you’re not sure if an individual from your organization has paid the full rate in the past, check this list.
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.
Groups referred by outreach partners can get $75 to $150 off specific levels (see table below). 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 to represent an organization’s investment in SMT training. 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; allied organizations across a country, state, region; or some other cohort or grouping of many organizations.
| Cost | Outreach Partner Referral (must forward mass communication received from one of SMT’s Outreach Partners) | Regular | |
| Groups with budgets over $1M |
Globally | $1,600 | $1,750 |
|
Groups with budgets
under $1M |
North America & Western Europe |
$1,250 | $1,400 |
| Outside of North America & Western Europe |
$625 | $725 | |
|
Additional people from the same organization
|
North America & Western Europe | $800 | $800 |
| Outside of North America & Western Europe |
$600 | $600 | |
|
Group Rate up to 10 seats
(payment by invoice) |
North America & Western Europe | $9,000 | $9,000 |
| Outside of North America & Western Europe |
$6,000 | $6,000 | |
Note: during and after this intensive, participants and their organizations will have unlimited access to the recordings of the program’s sessions as well as SMT’s library of 150+ hours of training, which would cost over $4,600 if purchased individually.
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.
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.
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 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.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 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 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.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.
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. 
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 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 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 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’re starting our third straight year providing grantee partners with Social Movement Technologies training and coaching…our grantees are in good hands.We have had a fantastic experience with SMT…they have been highly responsive to the needs of our grantees.The trainings are terrific–geared for every level of experience. And being rooted in social change movement, especially helpful to organizers.
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.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 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 strongly recommend SMT. Their strong organizing background, preparation and thoughtfulness made our strategy assessment with them enjoyable and really helpful.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.We’ve heard really good things from our grantee partners. SMT has a strong, grantee-focused way of working.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 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.
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.
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.
This will close in 0 seconds
