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
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 trainings are terrific–geared for every level of experience. And being rooted in social change movement, especially helpful to organizers.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'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.We have had a fantastic experience with SMT…they have been highly responsive to the needs of our grantees.We’ve heard really good things from our grantee partners. SMT has a strong, grantee-focused way of working.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.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!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!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'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. I strongly recommend SMT. Their strong organizing background, preparation and thoughtfulness made our strategy assessment with them enjoyable and really helpful.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 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.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!
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 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 prices
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.
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 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.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 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 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.
