Powerbase Live! ONLINE Training Curriculum

Since 2020 and the start of COVID19, we at PTP have been missing seeing all of you at our in-person Powerbase Trainings. We hope to begin offering these in-person trainings again soon, but in the meantime will still be holding our popular training topics through our Powerbase Live! ONLINE Training Series.

Please see descriptions of all the upcoming sessions below, and be on the lookout for email announcements as each session is scheduled!

1. Introduction to Powerbase. (February 12-14, 2024) Intended for beginners but open to all, Introduction to Powerbase lays the foundation for using the database. In addition to providing an overview of everything Powerbase can do, students learn the basics such as how to: login, change your password, enter new contacts, and conduct simple searches. It concludes with the concept of groups and the all important "smart" group. Full Agenda and Curriculum.
2. Controlling the Narrative: Effective Email and SMS campaigns. (March 25-27, 2024) Now more then ever we are fighting to craft the stories that will reach our communities amid the ongoing challenging political climate. In Controlling the Narrative we will learn the mechanics of building email templates, composing beautiful and responsive messages, segmenting your lists, sending mass SMS messages, measuring and understanding our click through rates, as well as strategies around messaging and integrating these efforts across your campaign. Full agenda and curriculum.
3. Building Community through Participation: Events & Activities. (May 6-8, 2024) From the very basics of creating meeting activity records through the intricacies of organizing a team to do phone outreach and generating reports of attendance, Building Community through Participation will cover everything you need to know about event and meeting organizing. The course combines the technical with political analysis, facilitation tips and discussion around building an inclusive and respectful meeting culture both online and in-person. Full agenda and curriculum.
4. Advanced Data Strategies. (2024 Date TBD) Your data can come from everywhere - online forms, sign in sheets, other databases and more. However, it won't help you organize unless it's properly parsed and de-duplicated. In Advanced Data Strategies, we'll cover how to effectively import spread sheets from other services and how to keep your data clean using deduplication and automatic merging. Full agenda and curriculum
5. Organizing online. (2024 Date TBD) A critical step in online organizing is providing the world with a form and a reason to fill it out. In this area, Powerbase has a lot of options! In Organizing Online, we'll cover how to create custom fields, profiles, petitions, webforms and more. We will review the difference between creating a new field and adding a field to a form. And, we'll cover how online and in-person organizing are inseparable components of any campaign. Full agenda and curriculum
6. Raising Money while Capitalism Collapses: Fundraising with Powerbase. (2024 Date TBD) With the economy in shambles, it is important to continue tightening our fundraising strategies and reinforcing our networks of support and mutual aid. Raising Money while Capitalism Collapses focuses on building financial support using contribution pages, peer-to-peer giving campaigns, $X in X weeks sprint-style campaigns and integrating these campaigns into our organizing work so we can build holistic campaigns that support our communities. Full agenda and curriculum
7. Search Kit Workshop and Practice Time. (February 28, 2024) Search Kit is more advanced than Advanced Search and allows for more complex queries and options to display your data. This feature is not for the faint of heart but geared for folks who just want to do more with searches and love to nerd out on data! You'll want to have a basic understanding of doing searches in Powerbase. Full agenda and curriculum
8. Form Builder Workshop and Practice Time. (April 17, 2024) Explore the future form building tool in Powerbase. There are many ways to create a form in Powerbase - Profiles, Webform, Petitions, etc. Over the last five years, the CiviCRM core developers have been hard at work to build a new form builder system designed to supersede all the others. Form Builder is not yet complete, but it is starting to pick up steam and currently offers some useful functionality. Using Form Builder you can create forms that record multiple contacts, relationships and activities, pair with Search Kit to create a custom report, with just the filters you want, stay within the Powerbase interface - no need to juggle links to get to the Drupal side. Note: This workshop is geared towards advanced users who want to start learning the tool that will eventually become the standard form building tool in Powerbase. Full agenda and curriculum
9. Electoral Organizing. (TBD) Have you noticed that nobody says "There's no real difference between Democrats and Republicans" anymore? Electoral organizing is a critical part of movement organizing and the stakes get higher every year. Come learn how to build walk and phone lists, import and export to and from the VAN, integrate online and offline lists and more as we explore how to use Powerbase to make your electoral organizing work more effective. Full agenda and curriculum
10. Phonebanking. (TBD) You have one week, a thousand phone number and twenty volunteers. Now what? Now, you use Powerbase's Phone Banking features! Learn different strategies for distributing the phone numbers securely and recording the results of the calls. You can do it in person at your office or with all callers participating remotely. There is no sugar coating the truth: it's complicated, but that's because it is so powerful. You can do it many ways, ask any questions you want and record all the answers.
11. Finding your Leaders. (TBD) When your organizing project has reached a certain size, nobody has a complete picture of your existing or potential leadership. Powerbase may not be able to identify leaders, but it can provide you with a list of candidates based on the criteria that makes sense to your organizing campaign. Whether it's counting events attended, membership dues paid, one-on-ones completed or any other meaningful metric for your organization, through searches and use of groups/smart groups, Powerbase can help round out the full picture of your base.
12. Mutual Aid: A Custom Tracking Use Case. (TBD) We all track, but what we track differs depending on our campaign. In Mutual Aid we will cover how to adapt Powerbase to keep track of anything you need. We'll use a mutual aid scenario as a starting point and learn how to setup a custom activity types to track resources needed and resources available, along with a webform to collect data, reports to see what is coming in, and a workflow to transition activities from requested to fulfilled.
13. Campaigns. (TBD) Let's get organized, online and offline! This training will cover setting up online petitions, including ones that automatically email elected representatives. Organizing in person? We will also cover door knocking and walk lists and (covid times!) moving to turn out phone calling.