Effective Leadership: SMT’s Recommendations and Guidance for Social Change Execs – Feb 2025

3h session | Instruction is in English with live captioning in 39 languages | Training held twice to meet all global time zone needs:

• Feb 3, Monday | 1 p.m. New York (EST) | Ideal time for the Americas | See time in your timezone
• Feb 4, Tuesday | 12 p.m. Brussels (GMT +1) | 4:30 p.m. Mumbai (GMT +5:30) | Ideal time for Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe | See time in your timezone

This 3-hour session is for executive directors and other members of non-profit senior staff leadership, and non-profit board members. Board members must be accompanied by the executive director.

The session will be useful to any non-profit involved in social change work. That being said, the bias is towards the needs of organizations that are waging campaigns for systemic change, or that are looking to move in that direction. Another bias is towards meeting the needs of under-resourced organizations. Leadership of larger organizations will likely find this session useful, but we will also be attentive to the needs of groups that are not in a position to throw more resources at a problem and don’t have large staff teams.

Registration covers 2 people. Participants must register with at least two executive leadership team members as there will be some breakout time to workshop and react to recommendations during the session to facilitate implementation afterward. 

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Organizational structure decisions to reduce silos and build synergy between communications, digital, and organizing – and avoiding common pitfalls
• Fundraising must-knows for EDs, focusing on (1) how to use specific social media channels in particular ways to cultivate funders and (2) key fundraising campaign elements many organizations miss that combine online and offline approaches effectively during appeal campaigns
• Managing tech stack (tool combinations) updates and shifts
• Recommended tools, work, and communication practices to build team accountability, including for teams that are hybrid or completely remote
• Staffing and managing change processes 
• Reaching and maintaining minimum digital security thresholds without added resources 
• Developing and using specific mission-centered metrics, the implementation details that enable metrics to drive alignment and accountability across the team
• Hiring, development, compensation, and evaluation practices for campaign and other staff 

Templates and samples will be provided. Participant teams will work through a worksheet together to help speed up implementation after the session. 

The three hours will include lots of structured discussion time so that participants can share challenges as well as what they’ve found useful in their practice. Following the session, participants can join a private ongoing online community of practice moderated by SMT.

There will be two 5-minute breaks.