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?
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Great idea!! Thanks so much.
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.
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‘how to make people join these projects’ from another thread
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-make-your-projects-popular/58020
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.
So true. I’ve been telling people how awesome Inaturalist is for a while and 1% or less is about right.
But one percent of a very large number is a large number.
If contacting 1000 people leads acquiring 10 new observers for the campus biodiversity project, I’d consider it a success.
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