Great questions. What my colleagues at University of Oklahoma are aiming for is to get more people–mainly undergraduates–involved in the campus biodiversity initiative.
The 1 to 90 ratio is useful. If sharing observations attracts 90 passive viewers, that means we’ll attract 1 active user, which seems like a lot. If we can reach all 31,000 students on campus, that would imply 340 active users, which would be huge.
I don’t expect anything close to that. But most active users start off as passive viewers. So more viewers means more users. Or is that wrong?
That’s right. Most people don’t take action in life. My estimate is 1%.
Meaning, if you show people something that will transform their lives in a positive way, and 100 people put their hands up and say they love it and say they’re going to do it every day forever, 1 out of those hundred will actually show up.
The true number is actually less than 1%, but 1% is an easy way to think about it.
I have experienced this multiple times, in multiple domains in life.
Whether they join or NOT, we as project admin on iNat, have no way to see traffic on the project. Who chose to join is a very small and tightly focused metric. It amuses me that our Placeholder Backup project - gains - one new member - for every thousand obs we catch! 29K obs and … 29 members. What does it mean? Nothing. But such a tidy progression, a thousand at a time.