Utilizing Social Media in a Citizen Science Project

The Vanishing Firefly Project is a citizen science project that asks communities to help scientists collect data on firefly populations. Our project provides a tool for the general public to monitor the quality of their own... [ view full abstract ]

The Vanishing Firefly Project is a citizen science project that asks communities to help scientists collect data on firefly populations. Our project provides a tool for the general public to monitor the quality of their own environment and learn first hand about the effects of urbanization, pollution control, and sustainability.
In the past three years of our project’s existence, the citizen scientists have ended up being a fairly homogeneous group. They tend to be older, white, and well educated. Our goal for 2014 was to engage a more diverse crowd of participants. Researchers in this study proposed social media as a mode of communication that could be effectively used to recruit, sustain involvement and educate a more diverse group of participants. The project’s field day event was pushed through posts and tweets on social media. Researchers created tutorial videos explaining the project goals and how citizens can help. These and other educational materials were posted on our project’s Facebook and Twitter pages. Throughout the summer, researchers gave count updates and encouragement to keep counting. New citizen scientists were recognized on social media and welcomed to the project. The scientists are currently using social media to communicate project results to the citizens.
The findings of our study reveal that social media was an effective means to sustain engagement in our project but was ineffective at changing the demographic make-up of who is participating in the project. We learned that not all social networking sites are created equal. Next year we plan to have a focus group with a diverse representation of community members to better understand what social media avenues they are most utilizing. We also learned that social media primarily supports pre-existing social relations. In the future we plan to utilize the demographic ads offered by social media platforms.