Understanding Engagement, Marketing, and Motivation to Benefit Recruitment and Retention in Citizen Science

摘要: The environment and biodiversity are key areas in which citizen science is well established as an invaluable tool for monitoring and research (Dickinson et al. 2012; Kullen and Kasperowski 2016). Ecological and environmental citizen science projects cover a spectrum of engagement, from small groups of highly engaged specialists, to mass participation projects aimed at members of the general public (Pocock et al. 2017; Theobald et al. 2015). One of the challenges of citizen science is that the evaluation of participant-focused outcomes of citizen science is limited (Martin 2017; Turrini et al. 2018); indeed, we often know relatively little about the characteristics and motivations of the people that engage, or do not engage, with citizen science (West and Pateman 2016). Anecdotally, practitioners of citizen science suggest that some projects fail to achieve the level of participation required because of lack of public awareness of the project, poor uptake, poor engagement, and low retention (see also Geoghegan et al. 2016). If people do not know about projects, do not find them engaging, or do not choose to participate, then projects will fail to provide their intended benefits to individuals, to society, and to decision-makers. Of course, participants in citizen science are not customers, yet there are parallels with customer-facing sectors that already devote considerable resources to researching their base. For example, sectors such as business and marketing combine insights from customer research with established marketing theory and practice to enhance sales. For citizen science projects to achieve their goals, people need to know about the project …