Les Rosies, feminist group doing danse and chant actions in anti-austerity demonstrations. Credits: Attac France
November 6 & 8, 2023 | 120 min sessions | Find your time zone here | Instruction in English. Interpretation provided as funding allows in response to registrations.
You need to build a movement for action across a country or internationally and have super limited resources to do it? Distributed action is a way to organize that supports leaders to organize their own events locally that are connected to a whole, for example as part of a day or week of action.
When people in cities across the country or world hold rallies with a coordinated message to stop a war, or push for climate action, that is distributed action – coordinated often by a small group of people who are providing the structure, materials and guidance that people can then run with.
Here at SMT, we know that this kind of organizing is powerful. The need for action is great and organizing resources are always tight. That’s why we’re offering this training.
We’ll go through the steps to set up a distributed action plan and decide which digital tools are going to be effective at every step. We’ll go through the risks and errors of distributed organizing and learn from groups who have run effective distributed actions.
We’ll cover:
- Distributed organizing and its strategic advantages
- Planning and implementing an effective distributed organizing campaign, including designing highly replicable actions, creating small groups, and supporting their development
- Designing strong digital pathways for people to organize and take action
- Pros and cons to a range of support tools
We’ll also learn from presenters who have run distributed organizing campaigns in different regions of the world.
Intructor
This series will be instructed by several campaigners who will be sharing specific campaign examples and lessons they’ve learned from them, such as 350.org – Southeast Asia, Leadnow – Canada, the Sierra Club – USA, the Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center – USA, Greenpeace – Netherlands.
Main instructor: Victoire Guillonneau has organizing distributed actions over the last 15 years in France and across Europe. Her experience includes coordinating street art actions simultaneously in 7 countries and helping coordinate a day of climate action in 30 cities in France with 150,000 participants. Victoire is SMT’s Europe Movement Support Coordinator.
Cost
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.
| Price | Annual budget in USD | Early (by October 7, 2023) | Early Outreach Partner (thru Oct 7, 2023 only) | Regular (cost after October 7, 2023) |
|
North America & Western Europe
|
$2M+ | $190 | $170 | $210 |
| $500K-2M | $170 | $150 | $190 | |
| Under $500K | $150 | $130 | $170 | |
| Group Rate NA & WE (up to 10 seats) | $1,140 | $1,140 | $1,330 | |
|
Global (outside North America & Western Europe)
|
$2M+ | $150 | $140 | $170 |
| $500K-2M | $130 | $125 | $150 | |
| Under $500K | $95 | $85 | $115 | |
| Group Rate Global (up to 10 seats) |
$950 | $950 | $1,140 |
- Groups with subscription memberships for coaching and support get a significant discount. Contact your coach about this.
- *Cost for 2nd person from an organization should not be higher than the first person cost. For example, if first person cost is $95, that will also be 2nd person cost.
Outreach Partner Referral Discount
Groups referred by outreach partners can get $75 to $150 off specific levels (see table above). 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. 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.
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.
Register now
Testimonials
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.
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.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.
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 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.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!
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 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’ve heard really good things from our grantee partners. SMT has a strong, grantee-focused way of working.
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 pricesI 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.
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.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.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'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.
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 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!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!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.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 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.
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. 
