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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 4 continents, SMT’s small but highly effective team has trained staff from over 4400 groups and unions over its first 10 years, and worked with 150+ 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, campaigning during COVID, remote team recommendations, Twitter, 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.
October 4, 11, 18, 2023 | 90 min sessions | Find your time zone here | Language: English with interpretation provided as funding allows in response to registrations.
We often put a lot of time and resources into websites and landing pages. So it’s frustrating when we realize our site isn’t visible to the key audiences we care about. And it’s downright galling when fossil fuel companies and other opponents are popping up first, with our campaign against them nowhere to be found. This 3-part series will up your game on Search Engine Optimization. Learn more and register here.
October 12 & 19, 2023 | 2 hour session | Training offered twice:
Some of us face threats to our personal safety when we take action or speak out, or even when we go about building relationships to build community power or when we’re laying the groundwork for a campaign as we gather information. What can we do to increase our safety in the face of these threats? That is what this training addresses. Learn more and register here.
October 25, 2023 | 90 min session | Training offered twice:
Every social justice organization should have an annual online/offline campaign plan. This training is a guided walk-through of the plan template that SMT has developed and refined over 10 years of working with hundreds of groups. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. Learn more and register here.
November 6 & 8 | 2 hr sessions | Find your time zone here | Instruction in English. Interpretation based on demand
You’re launching a campaign with national or international impact? You know people care about it but decision-makers don’t see it as a priority? Your small team wants to build activism widely at the local level and needs to use limited resources wisely? This training is for you. We’ll go through the necessary steps to set up a distributed action plan. We’ll cover useful tools (free, low-cost and higher cost), risks and errors to avoid, and learn from groups that have run effective distributed actions. Learn more and register here.
November 22: For African campaigners and activists | 90 min session | 2pm Nairobi – 12noon Lagos & Kinshasa – 1pm Jo’burg | Interpreted to French and Portuguese
Are you an African campaigner or activist looking to build strong people power campaigns? Got a list of supporters but not sure how to activate them in powerful ways to win change? Wondering how to keep the momentum going after an action? This training addresses how to build a sustainable activist pipeline even with a small team. Learn more and register 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.
January 18, 2024: For African campaigners and activists | 90 min session | 2pm Nairobi – 12noon Lagos & Kinshasa – 1pm Jo’burg | Interpreted to French and Portuguese
Are you using MailChimp for email or Change.org for your petitions? If so, you need this training! Learn about a movement tool (Action Network) designed by and for activists and being used in campaigns across the globe. We will look at how to use the powerful free version to send emails, launch petitions, and hold all your supporter information. Learn more and register here.
January – June 2024 | 90 min sessions | Sessions for all time zones globally | Instruction in English. Interpretation based on demand
You know you need to increase digital security but are having a tough time getting it done across your team? This is for you! This training and support process is for organizations that are looking for a structured, supported and proven way to implement greater digital security across their team. More information and register here.
March 20, 2024: for African campaigners and activists | 90 min session | 2pm Nairobi – 12noon Lagos & Kinshasa – 1pm Jo’burg | Interpreted to French and Portuguese
Is WhatsApp one of your main channels of communication with your people? If so, this training is for you. As the most used app on the continent, campaigners are using WhatsApp in creative ways to build people power. From creating different groups for language access and geographic location, to using WhatsApp Communities, missed call campaigns, fundraising and managing volunteers, this training will focus on how to use WhatsApp to build more power in your campaigns. Learn more and register here.
February 6 – March 12, 2024: 12NOON Kinshasa | 2PM Nairobi | 11AM Accra | 1PM Jo’burg
Most sessions will be instructed in English. Simultaneous interpretation in 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.
April 9 – June 6, 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 three-week intensive, with 3 hours of training per day Tuesday-Thursday, 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. Learn more and join the waitlist:
July 10, 2024: : for African campaigners and activists | 90 min session | 2pm Nairobi – 12noon Lagos & Kinshasa – 1pm Jo’burg | Interpreted to French and Portuguese
Are you currently using storytelling as a core part of your campaign work? Do you have your own personal story that relates to a campaign issue you work on? Do people relate to your narrative? This training is going to focus on developing narratives that win campaigns through a hero’s journey. Learn more and register here.
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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.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'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. 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.
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.
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 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'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.
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 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!We’ve heard really good things from our grantee partners. SMT has a strong, grantee-focused way of working.
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.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.We’re starting our third straight year providing grantee partners with Social Movement Technologies training and coaching…our grantees are in good hands.I strongly recommend SMT. Their strong organizing background, preparation and thoughtfulness made our strategy assessment with them enjoyable and really helpful.
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.
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 pricesSMT 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 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 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 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!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.
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.
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!
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