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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
Dec 5, 2024 30-minute Introduction to 2025 reading groups coming up, with the opportunity to sign up.
Reading groups on 2 of Jane McAlevey’s books, and “Practical Radicals.” Registration for the introduction session coming soon. Let us know if you’d like to co-host a reading group for another book. Learn more and register here.
Jan 14, 21 & 28 | 3 weeks; 2h-session per week | Instruction in English. Interpretation based on demand
For activists and campaigners waging justice against big adversaries, and journalists. How to build pressure in campaigns targeting big corporate and government decision-makers, and build media visibility, by hijacking hashtags, orchestrating Twitter storms and building international solidarity on campaigns. Explore the rapidly growing world of Bluesky, a social media platform that millions of users are joining as an alternative to X (Twitter). Campaign examples from across the world. Learn more and register here.
Jan 22/23 2-hour session offered twice at times accessible worldwide. Free for most.
Want to refine your use of ChatGPT and other Large Language Models for effective text and image generation, text summarization and research? In this session we provide guidelines, movement-based examples, and tips and tricks on effective prompting techniques. We also cover how to build a custom GPT specialized for your organization, and use cases for it in social justice work. Learn more and register here.
Feb 4th 2-hour session offered twice at times accessible worldwide. Instruction in English.
We’ll cover recommendations for what executive leadership of social change groups need to do to lead their teams effectively in waging effective struggles and building power: organizational structure decisions to reduce silos and build synergy between communications, digital, and organizing; managing tech stack (tool combinations) updates and changes; recommendations on tools, work and communication practices to build team accountability, including for teams that are hybrid or completely remote, and how to staff and manage associated change processes; and hiring, development, compensation and evaluation practices for campaign and other staff. Templates, lists, samples and guides will be provided. Registration coming soon.
Starts Feb 12 | 5 two-hour-sessions | Instruction in English. Interpretation based on demand
People want to be part of something that’s bold and has momentum—something that connects at a heart level, gives them a voice and the power to make real change. Campaigns and organizations built like this have one thing in common: they harness the strength of powerful narratives, compelling storytelling, and striking visuals.
This series covers key storytelling elements, from crafting a strong audience narrative to collaborating with storytellers to create impactful digital content. 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.
March 20 – May 1. 2-hour sessions. Interpretation to several languages on demand. Free to groups of activists.
Ready to organize for power? From Africa to Asia, young people across the regions 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 globe. 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. Learn more and register here .
March 11 – May 1, 2025 8 weekly sessions + office hours + assignment feedback. Every session held twice for global time zone access. Instruction in English. Live captioning in many languages. Simultaneous interpretation in response to demand. Earn has certificate. Registration coming soon.
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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 program offered interesting case studies, expanded my digital campaigning knowledge, introduced new organizing tools and strategies, and enabled connections with professionals in the progressive space.Taking this course really transformed my organizing skills to be more effective. The program was an eye-opener and better positioned me as a Communications Officer. I learned about digital mobilizing, online community building, and more.We’re starting our third straight year providing grantee partners with Social Movement Technologies training and coaching…our grantees are in good hands.The program offered interesting case studies, expanded my digital campaigning knowledge, introduced new organizing tools and strategies, and enabled connections with professionals in the progressive space.The DCCP program enhanced my skills and provided valuable support. I've applied these skills in my job and community work. Well-designed and presented program!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.
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.This program helped us harness effective tools and tactics that are aligned with our movement's needs and organizational values.The course provided invaluable tools and strategies, real-world case studies from different cultural contexts, and a supportive learning environment that encouraged interaction and peer learning.
The trainings are terrific–geared for every level of experience. And being rooted in social change movement, especially helpful to organizers.
SMT helped us think through what type of CRM we need and choose a texting platform to reach our base. SMT’s coaching has been instrumental in helping us develop a social media strategy that communicates our message through the voice of the young people involved in our organization. The program made me think holistically about offline and online impacts.Each session was well-facilitated, skillfully blended presentation, discussion, and practical exercises, allowing me to immediately apply techniques to my work.This training provided invaluable clarity and direction for my digital organizing work, empowering my team to work more effectively.It helped me better understand, through the experience of like-minded organizers, how to use accessible digital organizing tools to support the efforts on the ground.This program greatly helped integrate our thinking on organizing and digital campaigning. I wish all our organizers and digital staff could undergo this training.I'm still digesting the valuable information from this training and applying it to my work. Meeting activists worldwide and learning about important campaigns was inspiring.This program is very comprehensive and provides tons of tools and resources that have strengthened my skillset in digital organizing. This is a great program that I highly recommend.
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.
We have had a fantastic experience with SMT…they have been highly responsive to the needs of our grantees.This program was very useful for understanding the digital aspects of organizing workers and incorporating them into a comprehensive campaign toolkit.Learned invaluable skills, gained practical knowledge, and connected with inspiring professionals.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!Highly recommend it for individuals in civic organizations looking to enhance their technological campaigning skills!SMT's expertise in social media, ads training, and particularly their personalized coaching, has been invaluable for navigating the unique challenges of the non-profit sector. SMT's guidance has empowered us to adopt new technologies and strategies, leading to our most successful social media ads campaign to date. Their support is a game-changer for organizations stepping into unfamiliar digital territories.This program has been a great experience for me personally and for my work. With the few campaigns going under way I’m excited to show my colleagues what I have learned from SMT!
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 strongly recommend SMT. Their strong organizing background, preparation and thoughtfulness made our strategy assessment with them enjoyable and really helpful.This program has boosted my confidence in organizing and sustaining digital campaigns.SMT supported our coalition so we could play a more powerful role in advocating for our work and priorities with funders and elected officials. They facilitated a process to take a loose group of collaborators across a large geography and worked with us to build a cohesive understanding of shared values and how we could present ourselves.I felt supported by a community of hundreds throughout my learning journey.I initially thought this program was centered around communications, but it offered so much more. It provided an inside perspective on organizing work and how communications integrates with it.I learnt a lot on grassroots movements, digital campaigns and communications in times of state intrusion or threats.For change-makers looking to harness people power for good. Expert presenters and experience sharing with classmates enhanced my knowledge and provided valuable, immediately applicable skills.
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!I was able to immediately use the tools I learned and apply them to our organization. The program was intense, but I loved every minute of it and learned more than expected.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 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 assignments provided a better understanding of how the nuts and bolts of digital organizing fit together.SMT developed a custom training for our youth climate fellows from around the world. It was a holistic training on creating campaigns from strategy to implementation and building our activist base. We appreciated SMT’s attention to detail around language and inclusion and always thinking about power building.I found this course inspiring, especially the strategies part. Learning from diverse students with different backgrounds was enriching."=
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.
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.We’ve heard really good things from our grantee partners. SMT has a strong, grantee-focused way of working.This program was pivotal in my early organizing career, providing a strong foundation for recognizing technology's power in social movements. It equipped me with tools to create effective systems for our organization and broader membership base.The Digital Campaigning Certificate Program was immensely helpful, and I continue to apply its learnings in my daily communications and strategizing.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.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'm grateful for the opportunity to expand my organizing knowledge with SMT. It's sparked creativity, and I'm excited to put new ideas into action.
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 received input on how to align field and digital work which is directly connected to the advocacy research that we are doing.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.It was powerful hearing directly from groups across the country using these powerful tools to win campaigns and create real change.The digital training was expertly executed and helped me develop new ideas and best practice to implement in our campaign.The program was an incredible journey of meaningful learning and connections with amazing advocates nationwide.The program offers excellent support, knowledge, and peer collaboration for learning about organizing and campaigning.
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 pricesThe program allowed me to deep dive into specific campaign strategies, learning from diverse examples of what worked and what could be improved.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!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!For anyone who wants to dive into the world of digital communications, this is the training for you!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.I had an amazing time. I am already applying the valuable content in my organization.
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 appreciated connecting with passionate changemakers across the U.S. to discuss effective digital campaigning strategies.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.
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