Last year, in a survey sent to members of the citizenscience.org listserv, project evaluation was ranked as a top priority for enhancing citizen science work (right behind project sustainability). In response, we want to find out what we can do to make evaluations easier for you.

Next week we will send out an email invitation to share your input on project evaluation needs. Whether or not your project has conducted an evaluation, your feedback is critical! We want to know what you need to support future evaluations, and (for those of you who've been through the process) what strategies have worked well (or not so well) for you.

Your responses will help inform a newly-funded NSF initiative called DEVISE, aimed at, "DEveloping, Validating, and Implementing Situated Evaluation Instruments to Assess the Impacts of Public Participation in Scientific Research."A major goal of DEVISE is to provide an online toolkit of instruments, designs, and strategies to help project leaders and evaluators measuring learning outcomes from citizen science engagement, and we can't do this without your help.

Again, we need your help regardless of your level of experience with evaluation. Please keep an eye out for an email invitation, and consider taking 10 minutes to respond to our survey and inform the tools we build to support your evaluation needs.

Thank you!

Tina Phillips, Evaluation Program Manager, Cornell Lab of Ornithology