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Social Movement Technologies
Campaigners and activists recognize they must use digital tools and tactics like never before – alongside direct action – to build people power and pressure targets to take action. Here are some upcoming trainings and resources designed to meet this need. To learn about additional upcoming trainings, join the email list. SMT also works with funders to provide support to grantees; organizing networks to support larger campaigns and networks; and directly with groups to provide tailored coaching and help implement campaigns. Feel free to reach out to discuss how SMT can support.
Experienced Digital Campaigner? Work with SMT With team members on 5 continents, SMT’s small but highly effective team has trained staff from over 4900 groups and unions over its first 10 years, and worked with 200+ groups on campaigns more in-depth. Part-time and full-time roles are available, with coaching and training roles starting as low as a few hours a month. See open positions.
Trainings on TikTok, remote team recommendations, X (Twitter), Mastodon, Telegram, Snapchat and more. Available anytime and captioned in 7 languages. Also join SMT’s Digital Campaigner’s Facebook Group for campaigners, with 3300+ campaigners from around the world, or SMT’s Slack group of campaigners, or one of SMT’s WhatsApp groups or Telegram channels. Access the trainings and online communities.
SMT Coaching rates and subscription packages
March – June 2024 | Sessions for all time zones globally | Instruction in English.
Are you a BIPOC social justice campaigner or staffer looking to deepen your leadership and responsibility in campaigns? This training is for organizers, campaigners, communications staff, fundraisers, and other staff involved in campaign work. This 3.5 month fellowship will enable participants to become next-level online/offline campaign staff combining time-tested organizing with the latest tools, tactics, and skills, including managerial skills. Learn more and apply here.
December 5 | 2 hr session | Instruction in English. Interpretation provided as funding allows in response to registrations.
How to use A.I. for the messaging, framing and segmentation we need to build people power and win campaigns. You’ll learn how to use prompt engineering to generate messages with the right tone, refine your framing techniques and more accurately target your audience. We’ll cover how A.I. tools can help us improve internal workflows and processes as campaigners, and how to use image generation tools and create effective prompts. Updated from June 2023 training. Learn more and register here.
December 6 | 12:00 – 1:30pm (ET) | Instruction in English, simultaneous interpretation in response to demand
Whether it’s a local school board or a global corporation, we know that for a target to give workers what they need, we have to make it more painful for them not to. In this session we walk through the steps to power map your target to ramp up your campaign strategically where you have the most leverage. Then we use a real example of a union campaign to illustrate a range of online/offline tactics and how they can be used to create “surround sound” around targets and secondary targets so they just want to make it stop. Learn more and register
January 23, 30 & Feb. 6 | 90-minute sessions
People want to be part of something that’s bold, has momentum, and enables people like them to have a voice and get things done. It’s hard to resist jumping on that train. This session covers the key elements of narrative, storytelling and imagery that we must use in our union to build an irresistible labor movement. Lots of strong and weak examples will be discussed along with common pitfalls to avoid and a chance to practice and get individual feedback on your work. Learn more and register here.
February 6 – March 12, 2024: 12PM Kinshasa | 11AM Accra| 1PM Jo’burg | 2PM Nairobi
Most sessions will be instructed in English. Simultaneous interpretation in Arabic, French, Swahili, and Portuguese available if at least one group of activists needs it.
Ready to organize for power? From South Africa to Algeria and Kenya to Cote d’Ivoire, young people across the continent and their families want a just and sustainable future. To achieve it, we must use non-violent organizing principles and methods passed down from successful anti-colonial and other movements, combined with new digital tactics being used across the continent. We must understand how movements can be built and nurtured. This training series and support program is for activists and campaigners who want to deepen their ability to lead movements and campaigns for justice. Register here.
March 11th | 12:00 P.M. (ET) | 2-hour session
How to use A.I. for the messaging, framing and segmentation we need to build people power and win union campaigns. You’ll learn how to use prompt engineering to generate messages with the right tone, refine your framing techniques and more accurately target your audience. We’ll cover how specific A.I. tools can help us improve internal workflows and processes as unionists, and how to use image generation tools and create effective prompts.
Although A.I. tools are already proving useful in campaigning, we can’t ignore the significant ethical questions that come with using them, or the alarming ways A.I is already being used to manipulate public opinion on a mass scale. This session will predominantly focus on the practical use of these tools. We will briefly discuss the organizing underway to address these issues and to hold A.I. companies accountable for how this technology develops. Learn more and register here.
April – June, 2024 | 10 weeks; 3h sessions per week | Sessions for all time zones globally | Instruction in English. Interpretation based on demand
Over 1,100 staff and activists of movement groups have taken SMT’s Digital Campaigning Certificate Program. This ten-week intensive, with 3 hours of training per week, enables participants to quickly build competency in the key 18 skill areas essential to win campaigns in the digital age. This program is ideal for beginner to intermediate staff and activists of social justice groups, including unionists, to rapidly ramp up familiarity and skill with digital organizing strategy, tools and tactics. Register now:
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SMT is rapidly ramping up support and training for movement organizations around the world. Additional training is planned. If there’s anything that you don’t see below that you’d be interested in, contact us.
Are you part of a non-profit/NGO/union or a funder committed to redistributing power for justice? Recognize the importance of digital along with direct action organizing? Watch the recording to learn more.
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.
The trainings are terrific–geared for every level of experience. And being rooted in social change movement, especially helpful to organizers.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 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.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’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!
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 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 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!
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
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!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!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 have had a fantastic experience with SMT…they have been highly responsive to the needs of our grantees.
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.We’ve heard really good things from our grantee partners. SMT has a strong, grantee-focused way of working.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 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!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.
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.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.I strongly recommend SMT. Their strong organizing background, preparation and thoughtfulness made our strategy assessment with them enjoyable and really helpful.
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 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 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.
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