October 4, 11, 18, 2023 | 90 min sessions | Find your time zone here
We often put a lot of time and resources into organizational and campaign websites and landing pages.
Ugandans protest extreme LGBTQ criminalization laws getting enacted in response to campaigns by American right-wing evangelicals. AP/Ben Curtis
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.
Sometimes this is critical to our work. For example, for a worker center helping people fight back against wage theft. Tough one if the people who need the support search online for help in their city and the center doesn’t come right up, right?
This 3-part series — designed for social justice groups with limited resources — will up your game on Search Engine Optimization. Sure, if you have wads of money and want to contract out, go for it. But this course will enable you to get results yourself. (It will also help you understand better what your contractor is doing and what to ask for if that’s the route you’re going.)
Here’s what we’ll cover:
SEO Basics
- How search engine results pages are structured and how site pages are ranked
- When you should consider implementing SEO strategy
- How a site’s backend affects search rankings and how to communicate SEO needs to a developer
- Tools for technical SEO audits
Content Strategy
- The importance of keywords and tools for keyword research
- How to use AI tools to create SEO titles, meta descriptions and structure page content
- How to implement keywords into existing and new site content
- Optimizing your social media channels
- Working with other sites to raise your rankings with “link building”
Benchmarking and Measuring Results
- Find out how to benchmark your site against similar organization sites and opposition sites’ rankings
- What and how to measure results using free tools
- Understand where to focus your strategy, including short-term vs long-term strategies
- Learn how to use results to inspire new content/material and campaigns
Team Management
- Time investment to expect, and how soon you’ll start seeing results
- Setting up guidelines, and basic SEO training, for your website’s editors
The series includes three 90-minute sessions. There will be 3 assignments to apply learnings to your organization.
Instructor: Polyana Ferreira De Oliveira, SMT Staff Partner
Polyana has been working with online tools and tactics for over 15 years, starting with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). She began with SEO sales, moved to an ad agency, and then helped build one of the first in-house SEO teams in Brazil. Today, she supports environmental and climate movement groups with content strategy, SEO, and online community building in Portuguese, English and Spanish. Having grown up as an undocumented immigrant in the US, and then most of her adult life in her native Brazil, she is also passionate about refugee and immigrant rights as well as preserving local and ancestral knowledge and customs. In Brazil, she works with community-based tourism organizations and partners, to prevent mass tourism and support responsible travel.
Cost
In order to support a movement organization learning space, SMT trainings are for staff of non-profits – NGOs, unions and electoral campaigns. Trainings are not for consultants or agencies.
| Region | Budget of the organization | Early bird (by Sept 1, 2023) | Early Outreach Partner Referral (by Sept 1, 2023) | Regular (after Sept 1, 2023) |
|
North America & Western Europe
|
$2M+ | $200 | $100 | $225 |
| $500K-2M | $180 | $90 | $205 | |
| <$500K | $160 | $80 | $195 | |
|
Global (outside North America & Western Europe)
|
$2M+ | $160 | $80 | $190 |
| $500K-2M | $140 | $70 | $170 | |
| <500K | $100 | $50 | $125 |
Outreach Partner Referral Discount
Groups referred by outreach partners can get $75 to $150 off specific levels (see table above). Please name the outreach partner in your registration and forward the email you received to [email protected]. The outreach partner discount does not apply to group rates or 2nd person rates, which are already steeply discounted. Outreach partners pass along opportunities for training and coaching to lists of organizing groups. This helps SMT as a non-profit reach more groups that could organize more powerfully with SMT support. Interested in being an outreach partner? Contact [email protected] and describe the size and type of groups you’d reach out to. Typically, this is a list of chapters of a network; allied organizations across a country, state, region; or some other cohort or grouping of many organizations.
Register now
Testimonials
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 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.We’re starting our third straight year providing grantee partners with Social Movement Technologies training and coaching…our grantees are in good hands.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 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 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.We have had a fantastic experience with SMT…they have been highly responsive to the needs of our grantees.
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.
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 trainings are terrific–geared for every level of experience. And being rooted in social change movement, especially helpful to organizers.
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.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.
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!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 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!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!
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'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 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.
