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.