I’m having difficulty in scheduling events for the Ambassador Program. I just had an event planned for today to which I showed up and waited 15 minutes past the start time for no one to show up. The event was a presentation on Inat (my intro to Inat presentation) for students at my college.
Has anyone else faced a similar issue? How should I or others facing a similar debacle schedule ambassador activities and events moving forward? Having a meeting canceled with no one letting me know is incredibly frustrating.
Out of curiosity, what sort of things did you do to make sure people knew it was happening, and did you have a sign-up form or anything so that you knew who to expect? You might try and collaborate with a local naturalist group or birding group on campus to better publicize your events if you find that to be an issue.
I’ve tried to lead or co-lead iNaturalist trainings for the City Nature Challenge and had no one show up. The meeting hadn’t been canceled or anything; just no one was interested in attending. Do you think that might have happened with your event?
Not entirely sure. I met with the Department chair for Science at LIU and she said that I would speak at their meeting. I was told to leave it up to them and to just show up. Part of the difficulty was that I am an Inat ambassador as well as a student, so I would be showing up in the capacity as an ambassador. Probably a misunderstanding or mistake that was made along the way.
This sounds like an issue with the club itself, so I would contact them. But honestly, having grassroots events with little/no turnout isn’t that uncommon. Making sure publicity is good getting RSVPs, etc. all do help. But even with RSVPs, you often get half the attendance (or less) than the number of people who took the time to say they would come.
Don’t take it personally, it may be end-of-semester burnout and week-before-Thanksgiving syndrome. I just got out of a poorly attended class where even the students who attended were asking if they could have a zoom option for our class meeting next week.
In regards to outreach events, I’ve seen this happen a couple of times and it’s frustrating, especially if you’re invited to present or facilitate but then nobody shows up. Not much you can do if you’re not the organizer. Maybe next time ask how the event will be promoted and think about what you can do to help. Maybe reach out to a few friends to go with you, or find out who was recently active on iNaturalist in your area and message them an invitation to connect. That way you can at least have a chat with friends while waiting or network with possible future helpers. If you do end up by yourself, use the time to make observations/IDs to feel like you’re still doing something productive.
I find with things like events posted on social media sometimes only 5-10% of the people who indicate they’re going will actually show up. I think it’s a combo of some people using that mechanism to bookmark interesting events and others just trying to look busy to impress their social media pals.
Networking with other groups and having them share events to their social media followers and mailing lists may help expand reach and bring in some more folks. For students, providing an opportunity to do something hands-on and make a difference seems to be helpful, or framing participation as being part of a team in a competition (e.g. bioblitz).
Please don’t be discouraged!!! I’ve had several events where no one shows. It’s a bit of a bummer, but as others have said, lots of factors could lead to the no-shows.
Here’s a bit of advice – for events, I try to do a bit of promotion myself. For iNat events, I’ll put up a journal post, and I’ll tag some of the top users in the area. I’ll reach out to some of the local conservation groups too – sometimes they’ll cross promote!
If an objective is to get new folks that aren’t yet on iNat, I’ll still put up the journal post and tag local users, but I’ll also include some lines of “bring someone that hasn’t used iNat!” or “good for new users.”
So sorry that happened. That’s never fun. I tried posting on FB in our town (which a lot of people in our small town use) and had only one person “sort of” interested in learning about iNat. So I scheduled a presentation for March (when the weather gets better) through our local library (they do a pretty good job advertising) so I am interested to see what kind of turnout there will be.
I do a lot of presentations and guided hikes in our community about other topics that are well-attended, so I’m hoping for some sort of draw just on that, but I really have no idea what to expect.
If the talk doesn’t have a great turn out, I’m going to try and combine it with a guided hike and see if that works better.
If you were literally the only person there, and no representatives from the department or the club showed up, then it’s pretty clearly not on you and definitely a misunderstanding, in my opinion.