Social Movement Technologies
Workshop Topics for Conferences
We generally run the following workshops in 60-90 minute blocks. Let us know if you are interested in a different topic, and we’ll tell you if we can do it. With all of these, we tailor them to the needs of the group. Our trainings are highly interactive. We also intentionally call on more experienced participants so that their experience enriches the workshop and helps less experienced participants identify sources of support and guidance within their network.
PLENARY
Ramping up our use of social media to build organizing power and win campaigns
In this session we discuss the latest tools and best practices for using social media to build organizing power and win campaigns. You’ll hear some of the best of what’s happening nationally, and we’ll demonstrate some very cool tools in real time. Get ready!
WORKSHOPS
- Digital Security for Unions and Organizing Groups. Cyber threats facing progressives have been growing for a while. Now the prospect of a Trump administration controlling mass data collection and surveillance and an empowered and digital savvy Far Right is motivating many of us to take this issue more seriously. We’ll cover the immediate and common threats we face–at the organizational and personal level–and how to prioritize what to secure first and make wise decisions about trade-offs. In this session you’ll learn immediate, painless and practical ways to protect your organization and yourself.
- Facebook for Organizing: Best practices for how to use Facebook to increase engagement among members and broaden the audience reach during campaigns. (Can include how unions are using Facebook for new organizing too if that would be useful.) The difference that how you present your content can make in virality using specific examples and quick and easy ways to make images that are more likely to get shared using Canva. Best practices of using FB Live. A few ways to measure the impact of your use of Facebook.
- Twitter for Organizing: Whether you’re a Twitter novice or fanatic, or anywhere in between, this webinar will help you bring more fire-power to your campaigns and grow your Twitter following quickly and strategically. We’ll cover how Twitter has been used successfully in organizing, how it can help you get media coverage and how to use it to pressure targets; also how to build your union or personal account strategically and quickly, and what kind of training union members will need to participate in Twitter campaigns. This workshop can work well split into Beginner and Advanced levels.
- Activating Members on Social Media: Do you want your members to be an effective and powerful force in your online campaigns? If yes, this training is for you. Do you need to build member online roles to add to limited staff time? This training will help you do that wisely. We’ll cover how to build a strong team of social media activists including: 10 powerful ways members can help, a basic social media training agenda for member-leaders, advanced social media training for member-leaders, building and growing your social media committee, policy guidelines, and pitfalls to avoid.
- Meme-Making for Organizing: The images you develop for social media can determine whether 150 people or 15,000 people see your message and take action in your campaigns. We’ll cover guidelines about framing your message and designing your meme so people want to take action and share it. We’ll show concrete examples of the kind of difference a good meme can make, and cover topics such as picture dimensions and file types, and where to go for good source material. We’ll also recommend a couple of the most-used tools and demo one of them, showing you live how to start with a plain photo and turn it into something that will drive action.
- Email Best Practices for Organizing: We’ll cover how to use email most effectively in your campaigns and write emails that drive action; how to build a powerful list and make sure your emails aren’t getting trapped in spam folders, and how to gage results.
- Turn Your Website into an Organizing Powerhouse
How powerfully is your website helping you win? This workshop will help you make it a more powerful tool in your online organizing. We’ll cover 17 key topics including for example: excellent websites and campaign microsites and what makes them great, the role your site should be playing in campaigns, key trends in design, a quick low-cost way to get most of the benefits of a campaign microsite without actually setting one up, the pros and cons of CMS platforms, today’s SEO, redesign and maintenance cost – what’s reasonable, tools and strategies for keeping your website updated with minimum staff time, how to tell if your site is working, and lots more.
- Multi-channel Strategy in Online Organizing to Win Campaigns. Wonder how to maximize all the tools and channels at your disposal so they work synergistically in your campaigns to drive action, build visibility, and increase pressure on your targets? We’ll cover the gamut here, from CRM (your database/emailing program), to website, to Twitter, Facebook, ActionNetwork and other action tools, and how to use them in conjunction with offline action. What makes sense to use how and when? And then how do you gage success and evaluate results?
- Measuring the impact of your online organizing
Are you posting, tweeting, emailing and wondering if what you’re doing is working?
This workshop will help you get the kind of information you need to focus your limited resources where they can get the biggest bang–and help others in your union/organization to understand the impact of what you’re doing. We’ll highlight quick and dirty ways to get the data you need to shape strategy and discuss quick ways to use things like Google Analytics and Twitter Analytics. How can you set up your campaign to track which allies are coming through and which aren’t, and which channels are contributing the most? What email metrics should you track to ensure your email isn’t going to spam? How can you measure your growing campaign power online?
We’ll provide sample worksheets for tracking metrics, as well as a priority list if you have to choose just a few things to track.
- Using ActionNetwork in campaigns. If you haven’t used it yet, learn about this low-cost powerful online organizing tool. If you’re using it already, we’ll cover some of the more powerful ways to use it that you may not yet know about.
- General campaign brainstorming/feedback session. This is workshop time devoted to looking in-depth at a particular campaign that multiple groups are working on. What is the campaign online/offline strategy? Is it effective? How could the online component be strengthened?
- Digital Security. Top tools to increase your security, how to evaluate threats and develop a security protocol.
- TikTok & Instagram for Organizing. Especially focused on how to create effective organic content to surface leads while tracking effectiveness of follow-up.
- Individual consults. We also are often asked to schedule individual consult time at conferences, 30 minutes per consult. This can be during meal times, when not conducting workshops, during the evening etc.
Testimonials
[SMT's WhichCRM tool] helped me make a side by side comparison without having to spend hours sifting through demos and websites on my own. Invaluable!
We reached out very last minute to get help with ad campaigns. It was a really great experience, I have nothing but good things to say about it. We look forward to being able to work with them again in the future
The Social Movement Technologies Digital Campaigner Certificate is an excellent opportunity for me to meet digital organizers from across the country who are doing important work fighting for social justice on digital platforms. Often times, we are isolated in our work whether it be regionally or by issue, but through this program I've learned so much about all the cool ways other organizers are engaging and building movements. I've also been able to refresh my own knowledge about digital campaigning and have learned about a ton of new technology, software, and platforms that can be used for positive social change. Thank you SMT team!Design firms told us our current site couldn’t be mobile optimized, but SMT did it cleanly and affordably. The site looks great and SMT was easy to work with and addressed any concerns we had.Our staff have taken SMT’s excellent trainings over the past five years. Mastering the strategic use of digital tools is essential to advance social change online. SMT’s offerings are a much-needed and unique resource. And they are responsive and committed to meeting the needs of participants. We’re thrilled to partner on the new Global South track of their Digital Campaigning Certificate program, which is a need that we expressed and they acted on promptly. Thank you SMT!
[Story-Based Strategy] was awesome. It was sort of a refresher and a reset for me as an organizer and a social worker. I took a great deal of notes.[The Digital Campaigning Certificate Program] is a great course to get to know all the different aspects of digital campaigning. What I like most about it is the consistent focus on building power.We worked with SMT to get tech support on our virtual townhall event. It was helpful getting advice from an expert on how to prepare for the livestream, and how to best make it smooth. It was a big lift off our shoulders being able to rely on someone who has experience doing it.
The coaching has been fantastic. Staff has extensive understanding of the online landscape and strategy…jumped right into working with our members too, personable and supportive…great to work with someone who felt like a comrade and not just another non-profit consultant. I was amazed at SMT’s ability to connect us with experts or representatives of different online tools.SMT is a great resource if you’re looking to improve your organization’s social media presence and strategy.SMT was like a breath of fresh air in its approach to empowering small nonprofit organizing efforts. With not much funding, we were able to connect SMT to a few organizations in our network to provide analysis, coaching and hands on technical support. Here at Universal Health Care Foundation of CT, SMT gave us strategic help to up our game with our online organizing and engagement…particularly helpful in guiding us to a more savvy, productive use of social media.I got a LOT out of it...the idea that comms can be used not just to “raise the visibility” of my organization, but to build power -- to move people, engage them, get them to do something concrete to push our social justice work forward. The strategies and tools shared were super helpful, and have already had measurable impact. Staff is fantastic - knowledgeable, responsive, thoughtful, collaborative.This is great for C3's to understand what they SHOULD be doing during elections. I think there is much more space for C3s to take the GOTV initiative.We’re starting our third straight year providing grantee partners with Social Movement Technologies training and coaching…our grantees are in good hands.Love it!” (mobile optimization of TheStand.org)The benefits to us of regular coaching sessions were immediate.I want to express my continuing and deep appreciation for SMT’s staff. We’ve made great strides and SMT has been catalytic…Among other things–fast, smart, patient, thorough, skillful handling of the website makeover. You guys pulled it off quickly and affordably.The coaching sessions provide practical tools for making our social media move from passive clicktivism to actually doing something.Our experience to date has been wonderful, helping us make the migration from one CRM to another as painless as possible…a life saver, terrific. Quick to respond, SMT staff provide clear explanations that avoid all the techno-garble.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 webinars were very thorough, and the SMT team seems very responsive, broadly knowledgeable, and intuitive. The “WhichCRM?” questionnaire was helpful when I filled it out with my team. It helped us think about the aspects of a CRM we were looking for.We have had a fantastic experience with SMT…they have been highly responsive to the needs of our grantees.SMT helped us build an integrated, strategic approach to a union contract campaign. SMT’s work is sophisticated and flexible–their support was invaluable.
Last year, we worked with SMT on a census campaign with Native Voice Network, and we got so much direct campaign support, one-on-one coaching. I spent a lot of time doing just one-on-one coaching support with ads. after that I felt super empowered and fearless to just navigate all these different tools in the universe. So it was a really great and helpful experience for us.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.Two things I valued most about the program were lifelong access to the course materials and case study walkthroughs from some of the most compelling organizers and organizing collectives we have in the field right now. SMT taught our staff and leaders to use Twitter strategically, understand the intricacies of Facebook for organizing…They respond quickly, have real world organizing experience, do really solid webinars that leaders and staff can engage with.Our strategy sessions with SMT have really energized our vision for what we need to do…In 90 minutes, we were excited and encouraged about how we could better our media and communications work.This was a fantastic training experience and I learned a lot about emerging technology with lots of support! 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 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.
Super useful and practical strategy session. Great to learn what we can do to our website and Facebook page to make them better tools, described in a way I can explain to my board.
Trainings run by SMT are solid, accessible and worth checking out.Super helpful process with our staff and leaders to ID new tools we can use to reach our target folks.Incredibly knowledgeable…Weekly coaching has been a great experience. Keeps us on track. Staff is flexible, creative.The online coaching sessions have been really good for helping us make decisions about what makes the most sense for us to incorporate…and what we can let go.
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.We’ve heard really good things from our grantee partners. SMT has a strong, grantee-focused way of working.SMT’s knowledge of the organizational use of different CRMs and migration between them was very helpful.We hired SMT to lead a discussion about online strategy with some of our union’s staff. It re-kindled my desire and commitment to using emerging technologies in my organizing!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 found the email coaching course to be extremely helpful. I thoroughly enjoyed that this exercise involved everyone working from the same assignment. It made the feedback that much more helpful. I think this has been one of the best SMT sessions that I've taken.All of SMT training is packed and powerful!"I have found the webinars and trainings by SMT to be timely, relevant and incredibly useful in my work.
I work often at the intersection of climate and labour and have been thrilled to see the trainings you organize have met my needs in advancing my work."We hired SMT to help with some ad campaigns. Folks are professional, experienced, and communicative. Knowing what was happening at different stages helped me understand what was going on in our programs. I was never embarrassed to ask questions. The SMT staffer explained everything that would happen, why he was doing something, how he'd accomplish it, which was great. It made me feel like we were working collaboratively. SMT also provides a lot of great trainings to the progressive community to equip people and organizations to do this work on their own.
I strongly recommend SMT. Their strong organizing background, preparation and thoughtfulness made our strategy assessment with them enjoyable and really helpful.SMT helped us choose an appropriate database for our organization. Its focused training sessions are valuable tools that have helped us further a conversation with our grassroots leaders about strategically building a more powerful, goal-oriented organization. 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.The one-on-one sessions have been invaluable given the expertise of everyone on the SMT team.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.Great ability to eloquently name a few top communications gaps that we could easily fix and increase our impact. The summary document is highly valuable; we will refer to it in our future planning![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.
I wish SMT had existed when I started organizing in 2010! I learned many of these skills on the fly, often through trial and error. Overall it is really helpful to learn about all of the new tools which exist, especially ones that non-profits can use for low or no cost. The presentation did a great job of outlining best practices for many different scenarios."I learned so much about different labour movement actions. The digital part was huge, along with actually just understanding the range of tools that are available to organizers. I knew about petitions, about actions in the street, but seeing how differently they could be appleid in so many unique contexts was really exciting. I feel like I got an entire history of the labour 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.Great coach for executing our group's livestream plan! Often we have little time to do comprehensive analysis or comparison of newer technologies, so it's important to consult with those with their hands on the tools, and have seasoned coaches in your corner who can help you execute plans.
Great information on how to make emails more impactful and spur action. Great to get direct feedback on a sample email.
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'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.
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. 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 view organizing in a whole new light. Everybody should have the opportunity to go through this experience, and get these tools, and start organizing.SMT helped us launch our first petition campaign…great experience, ended up with vastly higher profile for our work.
I would recommend SMT to anyone looking to be more effective online. We are definitely going to experiment with the directions SMT gave us in our strategy session. Very valuable to have consulting from organizers who are keeping up with all the latest.The trainings are terrific–geared for every level of experience. And being rooted in social change movement, especially helpful to organizers.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.SMT was really responsive to my questions and needs, and to customizing a training that met those needs. We had a collaborative relationship of understanding each other's needs and expertise, agreeing on outcomes and approach, and developing content.
"Skye's growth in confidence and strategic acumen through the SMT program has been a huge boost for our organization. She's also been able to bring tools, trainings, and ideas back to our entire staff team, making us more effective and responsive."
