Free campaign tools to make change happen
The Social Change Grid
A key tool we can use to understand how change happens.
The Social Change Grid allows us to visualise the different ways that social change can happen. This helps us to structure our campaign plans, spot opportunities, identify gaps and build connections. The grid is split into four sections or quadrants. Each one represents a different space where power is held and campaigning activity can take place.
The Changemakers’ Toolkit
A tool for anyone new to change and wants to get started.
This free training resource is for campaigners, activists, and changemakers of all kinds.This Toolkit is based on SMK’s Campaign Carousel training: a product of our innovative social change analysis and years of collaborating with changemakers. The Changemakers’ Toolkit modules are designed to help changemakers understand, map, and plan to create impactful change.
Introduction to campaigning and social change
Discover how things change and what it takes to be a great changemaker. Get to grips with tools like the Social Change Grid, and explore what it means to make a difference.
Analysing the problem and planning for change
Learn to plan impactful campaigns that get to the root of the problem. Explore tools like the Problem Tree to help improve your campaign strategizing.
Communicating for change
Gain the communication skills you need to share effective campaign messages that get attention. Learn how to craft powerful messages and get them seen.
Free tools to build solidarity in your campaigns
Solidarity is a commitment to standing together in the face of inequity, discrimination and exclusion, and working together to tackle it. Interconnected systems of inequality (such as racism, sexism, classism and ablism) can show up in how we campaign, just as they do in society itself.
Building solidarity means paying attention to the imbalance of power that exists between different people and groups and acting intentionally to transform it – to build connection and equality across diverse campaign communities. These tools can help.
The Power Lens
The Power Lens offers a bird’s eye view to make sense of how power is woven through all our relationships when we set out to make change happen. It shows how power is a ‘nested system’. Each individual changemaker has sources of power to draw on, but that power grows by working with others – in communities, organisations or social movements. Each of these groups exist within a wider ecosystem of change, ‘civil society’. And while many campaigners set out to challenge the systems of power and inequity that exit in society, those systems are at play at each level of the system too.
The Power Framework
Build solidarity in organisations with the Power Framework
Many people who work in social change organisations are committed to working more closely – in deeper solidarity – with people with first-hand experience of the issues your organisation seeks to change. But barriers to working together more meaningfully are baked into all aspects of organisational life. The Power Framework will help you identify challenges and opportunities that includes building awareness and tackling culture as well as ensuring the resources and policies are in place.
It’s All About Power
SMK developed its thinking about solidarity on the Power Project. Our guide, It’s All About Power, calls for a new way of thinking about power, and action to build solidarity in social change.
Free guides to campaign with confidence
Navigating charity campaigning: a brief guide for trustees
Support your charity to campaign with confidence, within the law, and within regulatory requirements. This short guide is built around five key questions to help you do just that.
General Election 2024: Charity Campaigning
What can charities say or do in the run-up to the election? Does the so-called ‘Lobbying Act’ apply to you? How involved does your board need to be? Bates Wells and SMK help guide you through it all.
Latest blogs and articles
Why you should throw out your election-focused campaign plan
Mariam Kemple-Hardy, Global Campaign Director at Oil Change International, reflects on traditional approaches to campaigning in the run up to an election – and why they’re too often counterproductive. I was recently asked for advice on developing general election...
Talk about your political activity: the right language could be the key
A new report from nfpResearch and the Sheila McKechnie Foundation offers revealing insights into the way that people relate to politics, charity campaigning, and ‘speaking out’. SMK CEO Sue Tibballs urges charities to be optimistic about what it tells us. Politics...
Diving into the 4Cs of effective campaign strategy
Setting campaign strategy can feel like a huge and complex endeavour. It needn't be. At its best, setting campaign strategy is about the people affected by an issue coming together to work out how best to bring about change, drawing on their respective strengths and...
Nine things I’ve learned from campaigners
Learning lessons from past campaigns can help campaigners be more effective. In the Podcast series 100 Campaigns That Changed the World Steve Tibbett examines some of the most important campaign in the UK and beyond. These are some of the lessons he’s teased out. ...
Making a difference, even when you can’t win
Liz O’Neill, outgoing Director of GM Freeze, makes the case for humility and telling the truth about what success might look like for your campaign. After nearly a decade at the helm of the UK umbrella campaign on genetic modification (GM) in food and farming, I’m not...
Five ingredients for campaign-winning social media
SMK Associate India Thorogood explains what participants can expect in her new Social media to win campaigns: rapid content generation workshop. Want to quickly create popular social media to help you win campaigns? I am running a content creation session for the...