A 4-week step-by-step intensive on using imagery in campaigns to project power and drive action

• Jan 28 – Feb 18, 2026: Ideal time for Europe, Africa, Asia-Pacific. See time in your time zone.
• Jan 29 – Feb 19, 2026: Ideal time for the Americas. See time in your time zone.

Instruction in English, with live captioning in 39 languages. (Simultaneous interpretation can be arranged with funding.)

Visuals are a powerful tool we often fail to harness fully in our campaigns. Too often, we show up visually without the boldness and strength needed to move the public and galvanize our own communities. From the signs and banners we create, to the images we share in the press and across social media, our visuals should not just communicate our message—they should amplify our power, create a sense of urgency, and spark transformation. The challenge? Our visuals often don’t reflect the true force of our movements, leaving us feeling less powerful than we are.

This intensive is for organizers, communications staff, and creatives who want to change that. It’s designed to sharpen your approach to visuals in social movements, help you understand how to maximize their impact, and give you concrete tools and technical skills to make your campaigns feel as bold as the change we’re fighting for. Whatever your role, this course will help you develop visuals and lead campaigns that project power, drive action, and shape a better world.

This program is for you if:

• You’re an organizer (field or digital or both)
• You’re in communications
• You hold a design role and/or you interact with others who do graphic design or visual production
• You’re interested in deepening your campaign’s impact through strong slogans, imagery and action in the streets and online

Key Learning Outcomes

By the end of this intensive, you’ll be able to:

• Facilitate visioning, sloganing, and design processes to create powerful visuals for your campaigns
• Produce powerful signs and banners that align with your strategy- liaising with print shops and/or producing by hand
• Know how to facilitate collective art-making as a means to strengthen community and strategic alignment
• Plan and stage actions for effective visuals
• Source physical and digital tools to level up your visual production
• Work with campaign timelines to create the images your campaign needs, when your campaign needs them

Program Structure

Over 4 weeks, this program will include: 

• 3 pre-recorded lectures to prepare for live discussions
• 3 one-hour plenary sessions
• 3 one-hour small group coaching sessions
• Hands-on assignments aligned with current campaign needs
• Instructor feedback on assignments 
• Access to an ongoing peer community and resources

Curriculum

Week 1: Visual strategy: the difference it can make

• Frameworks for how visuals can strengthen campaigns
• Vocabulary to discern strategic impact
• Recurring dynamics of creating visuals in organizing
• Participants will compare their organizing contexts, identify connections, and envision new possibilities for their work 

Week 2: Developing + Producing impactful signage

• Practices participants can use to translate the rich stories our people have into slogans and images that work for the street and the internet
• Techniques to craft effective slogans and develop and test imagery that match campaign narratives
• Best practices and tools for formatting signs and banners for maximum legibility
• Ways to include community members in producing visuals
• Tips for working with print shops and design partners
• Techniques to hand-make signs, banners and props

Week 3: Visual Strategy in the streets: Action, documentation & campaign storytelling 

• Techniques for ensuring that movement events (rallies, marches, sit-ins, banner drops, etc.) reliably communicate our narratives and return strong visual content
• Best practices for action staging, documentation and visual strategy as a component of campaign planning
• What makes events feel powerful to attendees and to people watching remotely
• Archetypal narrative arc of a campaign
• Detailed templates to use common opportunities to document and share our movement’s most powerful stories

Week 4: Wrapping it all up

• Review of assignments from week 3 and answering final questions

Instructors

Instructors are co-founders of Look Loud, developing action art, tactics, and cultural strategy in collaboration with U.S. movement groups to build our capacity to speak precisely and powerfully to the public across both physical and digital platforms. Recent collaborations have spanned organizing in climate, anti-racism, immigrant rights, pro-Palestine movements and more.

Rachel Schragis is a cultural organizer and arts educator from New York, specializing in creating participatory visual tools for power. She joined the justice movements during Occupy Wall Street, applying her skills as an elementary art teacher to economic justice causes. Before co-founding Look Loud, Rachel worked as an organizing fellow at Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and as arts coordinator for the People’s Climate Movement, building teams to scale visual operations for mass mobilizations. She is a Robert Rauchenberg Artist-As-Activist award recipient, Earth Day New York Activist of the Year, co-founder of @Vent_Diagrams, and a core member of Building Stories.

Josh Yoder grew up in the kind of rural Pennsylvania city that only gets mentioned during presidential elections and conversations about fascism. He started organizing as a response to the bigotry of the so-called ‘War on Terror,’ and anti-immigrant paranoia of the early 2000s. Previous to co-founding Look Loud, he worked on visual strategy for Sunrise Movement, The Natural History Museum/Not an Alternative, The March for Science, the Public Society, and a half-dozen anti-extraction campaigns. His work supports demonstrations in the street to be powerful in digital space – to make our actions reach people who haven’t shown up yet, and to expand the aesthetic tent of social justice to include communities who do not currently see themselves represented.

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. Consultants and agency staff who register will have their registration fees refunded. Alternatively, on-demand trainings are available to all on SMT’s course platform.

Region	Budget of the organization	Early bird (by Dec 1, 2025)	Regular (after Dec 1, 2025)	Additional people from the same organization:
North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand	$2M and above	$710	$880	$707
	$500K-$2M	$640	$800	$640
	Under $500K	$490	$610	$490
Africa, Asia-Pacific (except Australia, NZ), Eastern Europe, MENA, Latin America	$2M and above	$570	$710	$570
	$500K-$2M	$350	$440	$354
	Under 500K	$210	$270	$210

Group Rates (up to 10 seats) – designed to help networks and funders make this program accessible to their communities. Contact info@socialmovementtechnologies to pay via bank transfer.

Region	Group Rate (up to 10 seats)
North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand	$6,000
Africa, Asia-Pacific (except Australia, NZ), Eastern Europe, MENA, Latin America	$2,700