Increasing collaboration and
connection between think tanks

Smart Thinking's Membership Network hosts multiple training sessions, webinars and networking events throughout the year to help build the UK think tank community and enable knowledge sharing, pooling of resources and peer-to-peer support throughout the sector.

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Upcoming training

People management training

16 March 2026
9.30am - 4.30pm

Are you new to management? Looking forward to the day when you become a manager? Or have you been a manager in a think tank for a while but never had the chance to formally develop your skills? Then this training is for you!

Members £295 (+VAT)
Non-members £495 (+VAT)

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Think tank devolution training

24 March 2026
9.00am - 1.00pm

If you are looking to broaden the reach and impact of your work across all four nations of the UK this training session, with PolicyWISE, is for you! We will cover all that you need to know about better engaging with politics outside Westminster.

Members £220 (+VAT)
Non-members £395 (+VAT)

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Resources

Latest resources and information for think tanks

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Webinar archive

Take a look at some of our previously held webinars

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Member chat groups

Share knowledge, ideas and views with your fellow members

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MEMBERS ONLY

Upcoming webinars

MEMBER ONLY

The real Living Wage for employers

19 March 2026
11am - 12pm

Are you a Living Wage accredited organisation and want to hear the latest updates? Are you thinking about starting the process to becoming accredited and want to find out what it involves? Lianna Etkind from the Living Wage Foundation will be talking us through what all employers need to know about the Living Wage.

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MEMBER ONLY

How to run your own focus groups

21 April 2026
11am - 12pm

Focus groups are an important part of think tank research but can be prohibitively expensive to run. Ben Cooper from the Fabian Society regularly holds his own focus groups to feed into his research and in this webinar will be taking us through how he does it.

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Latest news

Fundraising fundamentals training

A full house for our Fundraising Fundamentals training as we took a big group of think tankers through a whole of day of core fundraising knowledge and skills. We covered who and why do donors fund think tanks, how to generate leads, how to get your introduction, how to make the ask and how to manage the donor relationship so you successfully secure repeat funding.

New strategic communications training

A brand new training session was run for the first time in December. Aimed at those working in the communications teams of think tanks, the training is split over two sessions to fully explore the topic. Part 1 looked at the purpose of a comms strategy, defining comms goals, understanding and mapping audiences and developing a strong key message. Part 2 will take place in the new year.

In-person Operations & HR Network meeting

Our Operations & HR Network (one of our most established networks) met in-person just before Christmas for a big meeting covering everything from our new compliance master list that everyone has contributed to, diversity in recruiting, AI policies, salary discussions with staff and many many more.