CoCoRaHS: Recruiting and Retaining Volunteer Observers for a Citizen Science Precipitation Network

A citizen science project's success or failure may depend upon its ability to recruit and retain volunteers. CoCoRaHS, the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network, recently celebrated it's sixteenth year with over 36,000 observers making their first observation during that time-span. The network continues to go strong with over 19,000 active observers today.

This presentation will take an in depth look at CoCoRaHS, its demographics, recruiting (infrastructure, referral sources, campaigns), and retention. We will share our analysis with a focus on numerous statistics and trends that have been seen during the first four years that the network was truly national in scope (2010-2013) .