Social Movement Technologies (training & certificate)
Summary
Social Movement Technologies (SMT) is a US-based training organisation that runs courses and a certificate program on the digital, communications, and technology stack that progressive social movements use. Its curriculum is the closest English-language equivalent to a structured practitioner course in digital organising, and it serves as a credential for organisers moving into technology-lead roles in US campaigns and non-profits.
Body
https://www.socialmovementtechnologies.org/
SMT was founded by organisers who had been through the Obama 2008 and 2012 digital programmes and wanted to teach the next cohort what those programmes had actually done, beyond the public marketing. [source: social-movement-technologies] The curriculum is structured around the assumption that digital tools only matter in service of an organising strategy, and each module pairs a tool or tactic with the organising problem it solves. [source: social-movement-technologies] Topics include email-list building and list segmentation, distributed-organising team structure, content workflow and editorial calendars, data-driven program management, and the relationship between digital analytics and field metrics. [source: social-movement-technologies]
The certificate program runs as a multi-week cohort with peer learning and a final project in which the participant designs a digital-organising program for an actual organisation. [source: social-movement-technologies] This is a deliberate contrast with the shorter workshop format: SMT argues that the integration between digital, field, and communications cannot be taught in a one-day workshop, and that the cohort format forces participants to work through the integration problems on a real organisation. [source: social-movement-technologies]
SMT is not a free resource — the courses are fee-based, with scholarships available — which is why the source page is registered at Verify-then-use rather than Core despite the curriculum quality. [source: social-movement-technologies] The transferable content (the organising-strategy-first framing, the distributed-team structure) is published openly enough to be reverse-engineered from the public course descriptions; the certificate credential itself is what is paid for. [source: social-movement-technologies]
The orientation is progressive US politics, and the curriculum reflects it (voter-contact, GOTV, persuasion campaigns, member-based organising in a US non-profit context). [source: social-movement-technologies] Campaigns outside this orientation adapt the structural lessons and replace the context-specific examples. [source: social-movement-technologies]
Use it for
A reference curriculum when an organisation wants to upskill a digital team in organising strategy; a credential for an organiser considering a transition into a technology-lead role; a benchmark for what a structured digital-organising training program should cover.