Events

Events and Trainings

Events

Please contact us at scherthan@openmindsev.org if you would like to register or find out more information about any of our upcoming events.
These events are for groups that specialize in using digital tools to facilitate large-scale education of the public about how they can effectively participate in democratic decision making.

Upcoming Events
Coming soon!
OPEN Summit - Warsaw, Poland June 2020

Executive Director's Summit - Barcelona, Spain March 20-23 2020 - This Summit will bring together founders and Executive Directors of various NGOs so that they can meet each other in person, share lessons learnt, raise strategic and organisational development questions and forge new relationships.
Past Events

Tech Summit - Goa, India October 27-Nov 1 2019 - This summit is for all the Tech and Tech adjacent staff of the NGOs to learn about various tools and tech platforms. It is an excellent opportunity for tech staff to learn from each others successes, share skills, plans and visions and build working relationships.
OPEN Summit - Frankfurt, Germany June 17-21, 2019 - This event is for all the Senior staff from NGOs from various parts of the world. This Summit will be primarily to facilitate skill-sharing, problem-solving, and collaboration building, with session content appropriate for both senior and mid-level staff.
European Summit - Budapest, Hungary March 26-29, 2019 - This event brings together NGOs from the Central European region to train new campaigners on tactics, strategy building, using the effective language and help build connections with each other to collaborate well.
Digital disinformation & European Parliamentary Elections - Berlin, Germany February 4-5 2019 - This event will focus on How disinformation has already distorted elections and what we’re likely
to see next, How to understand the full range of threats to our democracies and our communities that often get collapsed into the unhelpful term “fake news” and what can we do now.
Startup Summit - Paris, France September 3-7, 2018 - This event will be for groups that are just starting their journey and want to learn the basics of building an organisation that can help citizens in their region participate in their communities as well as train new staff on the best tools, including new tech, currently available to them.
Tech & Organising Summit - Cluj, Romania April 23-27, 2018, The agenda will involve a lot of training on tech practices and tools, organising models that NGOs can use and plan programs to run with a big focus on using the best tools that they will need to do effective organising and learn from each other on best approaches that have been already tried by others in the past.
Open Summit - Bangalore, India Feb 5-9, 2018, This meeting, similar to the summits before it, will be an important step in creating a culture of trust. This has been vital for any collaboration, enhancement, and growing among groups. By exchanging their experiences, the participants realise how much they share in terms of similarities. They also realise how much they can learn from each other as some groups solve challenges that others are facing.
Startup Summit - Berlin, Germany November 20-24, 2017, This event will be for groups that are just starting their journey and want to learn the basics of building an organisation that can help citizens in their region participate in their communities as well as train new staff on the best tools, including new tech, currently available to them.
Tech Summit & Hackathon 2017 - Berlin, Germany In June 2017, technology staff from NGO’s all over the world gathered in Berlin/ Germany to share and create tools, models, innovations, and best practices. This year tech-adjacent staff was also invited to help build new technology to ensure that citizens could use this tech to be more engaged with and informed about their governments.
Learning Tour 2017 - Verden, Germany From July 11-14 Open Minds hosted a “Learning Tour” - Open Minds is a valuable partner for on-boarding and training all your new staff - with attendance by senior staff as well to facilitate training.
Executive Directors Summit in Verden, Germany 2016 - The 3-day event brought together the Executive Directors of organisations from Sweden, Ireland, Canada, Austria, Poland, Romania, Italy, Netherlands, Israel. It also included WeMove.EU, a pan European organisation. The focus was on leadership education and development in a changing world. Our educative initiatives included sessions on management practices, sustainable organisational growth, mental health and financial management. We also brought several experts in organisational development together; including Dr. Phil Ireland and Ben Brandzel to conduct 1:1 coaching sessions with attendees.

Trainings

We provide regular monthly virtual trainings on operational issues such as email-writing, social media, and activity evaluation. To bridge and narrow the knowledge gap, younger groups in particular receive regular hands-on 1:1 coaching on themes including email writing, rapid response, growth campaigning, campaign evaluation, fundraising, accounting and project management. Depending on the experience, topic and breadth of understanding from the part of the participants, each training session usually takes up to one hour.

Our staff, Stephanie Roth has a rich experience in designing strategic communications, organising and setting up organisations.

The fundraising and accounting trainings are given by Ranjani S. Rajashekaran, a consultant with experience in designing and developing reports on approaching the donors and the community for the fundraising needs of the organisations.

Other Trainings

OPEN Lives

February 14, 2020: How to reach new Instagram members? w/ Eva Suss. Instagram wizard will share the learning, goals and best practices made along the way.
August 26, 2019: Fires in Amazon! How should we take action to stop this.
May 29, 2019: Planning an election campaign w/ Raluca Ganea. This session will cover how planning, running and working through the various hurdles means in an Election campaign.
April 17, 2019: How to turn around mobilisation quickly and have maximum impact w/ Reggie Hubbard. This session will describe the tips, tactics, strategy and lessons learnt from a previous successful event on how to organise one for maximum impact.
February 27, 2019: Skillshare on growth w/38Degrees. This session will cover using digital tools, sharing best practice and new ideas and how to evaluate the growth in membership numbers.
December 13, 2018: Milestones of Campact's 2018 Member conference w/ Eva Suss. The session will cover practical tips towards bigger organising including in-person training.
October 25, 2018: writing a convincing Reader Focused Theory of Change w/ Becky Jarvis. Reader focused theory of change is one of the key components to an effective email. It answers the important question 'why me?'.
August 22 2018: Message testing on Facebook w/ Anisha Humphries. It will cover how to test messages, how to set it up, analyse results, and cover both theory and practical tips.
July 24, 2018: Alternative funding models w/ Laura O'Connell Rapira, Siobhan O'Donoghue and Jurjen van den Bergh. They will share ideas, opportunities and discuss how to mitigate challenges.
June 26, 2018: Lessons from Uplift's recent campaign victory w/ Siobhan O'Donoghue who will share how they managed to run and win the Repeal campaign.
June 25, 2018: Lessons from Leadnow's rapid response campaign w/ Jolan Bailey and Logan McIntosh They will share lessons from their recent rapid response day of action and share how they managed to mobilise so many people in such a short time.
June 6, 2018: How to effectively use ControlShift for campaigns w/ Eline Peters who will share how DGZ has used ControlShift effectively with a latest example.
May 10, 2018: How to build effective microsites w/ Sarah Knutson. Microsites are an increasingly used tactic for big campaigns and this training will give you all the tools to build one yourself.

March 29, 2018: Keeping Campaigning Fresh. What are the biggest tool trends and how to utilise them for maximum impact.
March 22, 2018: Intro to systems mapping and choosing systemic leverage points. How to identify, map and connect stakeholders and get results.

February 21, 2018: Using Whatsapp w/ Nelson Carr and Benjy Cook. How to use Whatsapp as a channel, organising and sharing to receive maximum results from campaigns.
November 15, 2017: Facebook Bots w/ Rowan Pereira. Learn about Facebook messenger and how to use it effectively.
October 26, 2017: General Data Protection Regulation w/ Michael Snook. This is a really important opportunity for all NGOs to understand what is GDPR, what you need to be doing right now and what you need to be doing in the next few months.
August 10, 2017: How MoveOn helped stop Trump from repealing Obamacare: Ben Wikler who led MoveOn's work on health care and helped shape the broader movement's strategy, will describe how the campaign worked and what's next.
May 9, 2017: Member-Led Campaigns @ MoveOn + 38 Degrees w/ Robin Priestley & Corinne Ball: Listen to Corinne (MoveOn) & Robin (38 Degrees) discuss and compare how they have supported millions of people to start, sign and win powerful petitions.
May 9, 2017: Running a great hiring process: Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman's recent session on best practice recruitment to help you find brilliant new staff.
May 10, 2017 Wielding Test Results (for beginners) w/ Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman: A crash course on A/B testing and harnessing experiment results to improve your digital campaigns. The beginner version of "Choosing Metrics Wisely"
May 11, 2017 Effective Metrics (advanced) w/ Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman: An advanced session with Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman discussing what metrics you should focus on and how to avoid vanity metrics.
March 25, 2017: Involving members in campaign planning: ActionStation walks us through their stellar strategy for engaging and empowering their members – ensuring their actions are as member-driven as possible.
March 3, 2017: Corporate Campaigning 101, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman. Learn the essentials of corporatecampaigning, and how it differs from political campaigns.
February 21, 2017: Psychographic Targeting & Advertising: Henny Smith. How GetUp used psychographic targeting and Facebook ads in the 2016 election to influence swing voters and kick multiple fascists out of parliament.
January 17, 2017: Media Training with Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Committee and generally regarded as one of the best media people in the business!
November 3, 2016: Texting the revolution: Text for Bernie director Daniel Souweine talks through the volunteer texting program that sent 10 million individualised messages in the 2016 election.

To attend an upcoming webinar or see a recording of past webinars please contact: scherthan@openmindsev.org.