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

Writing training - Marshalling your research and building a narrative

23 April 2026
9.00am - 1.00pm

This half-day training session is aimed exclusively at building and honing the skills of planning your writing and how you can effectively construct complicated narratives. The training will help you to produce clear, efficient and persuasive policy reports and briefings.

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

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Public speaking training for think tankers

30 April 2026
9.30am - 4.30pm

Do you want to speak more confidently? Do you want to understand more about nerves and how to control them? Do you want to find out more about how to craft and structure a message? Then this training is for you!

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

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TAILORED TO THE THINK TANK SECTOR

Designed by think tanks for think tanks

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

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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MEMBER ONLY

Think tanks and AI - online workshop

19 May 2026
2pm - 3.30pm

This workshop is open to all members and will be a facilitated discussion on how think tanks are using AI, which tools are the most useful and what guardrails or systems each think tank is putting around their use.

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Latest news

Our new Research Network launched in March!

Our new Research Network has now launched! This is the network for everyone working in research, no matter what area of specialty. We had an informal lunch where everyone got to mingle and meet directly with their peers and then dived into a policy challenge in small groups. Lots of bold and creative (and odd!) suggestions from a lively session. Looking forward to the next one!

Devolution training with PolicyWISE

In March we welcomed the new and exciting think tank PolicyWISE to come in and run a session for members on how think tanks can become ‘devolution-able’. It was a knowledge-rich, practical and timely session that got to the nuts and bolts of both the opportunity for think tanks in the devolved governments and how best to go about it!

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.