Nature Volunteers - Project Blog

Introduction & Background Our initial design workshop was hosted on the morning of Monday 19 th February, with some of our partner organisations and their volunteers, together with student volunteers.  The goal of this workshop was to introduce the website to some of the target audience, and get their feedback on how some of the key features of the website are proposed to work.  In particular, we were interested in how volunteers chose volunteering or citizen science projects in relation to our model criteria.  This was to make sure that we are measuring these important features appropriately in preparation for matching people to projects when the website is in use.  Additionally, we looked at how types of people and types of project could be categorised, which will be used to provide feedback on projects once they have been completed.  The aim of these exercises was to define as few groups as possible, whilst ensuring that they have meaningful definitio...

Just a quick update to show how we chose our project name.   We have also been busy running a workshop today with some of our volunteer friends, helping us to refine the website plan and what information our model will collect.   More on the workshop in a future post, but it was great to see so many people engaged and the feedback was incredibly useful. We generated several different names for our project, being somewhat cautious to avoid already existing websites or project names.   These ranged from the adventurous (“Go Nature”) to the descriptive (“Volunteer with Nature”).   Sending this out to survey, in a short amount of time we have gotten responses from 132 people, including conservation organisation staff, students and student volunteers, other volunteers and university staff.   Our conclusion from this is to go with “Nature Volunteers” as our project website name, as this was the overall leader with about 30% of the responses (volunteer with ...

Hello and welcome to our project blog! We’re building a website to increase engagement with citizen science and volunteering with nature conservation here in the UK.   Our goal is to have a system that can match people to projects, based on a few select preferences, and help to suggest volunteering opportunities that are local and interesting to them.   We started in detail about a month ago and now have a web design team on board, have completed a draft website layout and requirements and we are really looking forward to making progress in the coming months.   We are also working closely with our project partners from the New Forest NPA and National Trust, and have gotten great feedback so far. We have a workshop coming next week to finalise how we will measure projects and people attributes ahead of getting into the detailed planning stages.   For naming our website, we surveyed over 130 people from volunteering, student and conservation background for their...