Momentum will hold its first Scottish training event in Glasgow this Saturday, in the hope of galvanising the same levels of grassroots support for Labour that boosted the party’s prospects in England during the last general election campaign.

After appointing its first Scottish organiser, Jessica Galloway, the pro-Jeremy Corbyn activists’ movement is to focus on training and recruitment across the nation, in recognition that Scotland’s marginal constituencies – including a number of close Scottish National party/Labour battlegrounds – will be key to winning the next Westminster election.

The first training session will take place in the constituency of Glasgow South West, which the SNP held from Labour by a majority of 60 votes in June 2017. Local Momentum activists will learn about “persuasive conversation” strategies developed in partnership with American politician Bernie Sanders’ campaign.

Galloway said: “A good 20 of the most marginal seats in the entirety of Britain are in Scotland and we can’t keep fobbing it off with ‘we can’t deal with Scottish Labour because they’re too rightwing’. This has to be taken seriously but in a way that is sensitive to the politics of Scotland. Labour activists elsewhere understand that, but they don’t understand that you can’t employ the same strategies that work for the rest of the UK. There’s a lot more going on here.”

Momentum has a Scottish membership of just under 1,300, compared with 38,700 in England and 2,000 in Wales. In Scotland, Momentum runs a joint membership scheme with the Campaign for Socialism (CFS), a much smaller group established in 1994, and now has a key contact in every constituency Labour party in the country.

Scottish Labour’s revival remains far more muted than that of the UK party of late: it is the third largest party in Holyrood, behind the SNP and the Scottish Conservatives. YouGov polling in June found that the party had dropped 5% to 23% in Westminster voting intentions, compared with 40% for the SNP.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jessica Galloway. Photograph: Momentum

Last autumn, young Labour activists told the Guardian they hoped the energy around Corbyn, and the election of his favoured candidate Richard Leonard to the leadership of Scottish Labour, could offer a gateway back to the party for Scottish youth, many of whom joined the SNP or the Scottish Greens after they were first politicised by the yes movement during the independence referendum campaign of 2014.

Galloway said she intended to work closely with the CFS and three newly appointed Scottish Labour community organisers, who will be operating across the central belt in many of the working class communities where voters have reported feeling abandoned by the party in recent decades.

The Labour party can be too apologetic about its own history, while the SNP is very good at constructing a narrative that they are offering something different,” she said. “Now the SNP are losing traction with younger and more active people in politics, and its something that we should learn some lessons from.”

Scottish Labour has not experienced the level of factionalism seen in Westminster candidate selections south of the border. But Glasgow South West is currently the site of a bitter selection battle between the 2017 candidate, the CFS-backed Matt Kerr, and Asim Khan, who supported Anas Sarwar against Leonard in last November’s leadership contest.

Tensions between Corbyn supporters and more moderate members came to the fore at the Scottish party’s spring conference in Dundee, when centrists including the former leader, Kezia Dugdale, pressed hard for a vote in favour of the UK remaining in the single market.