Monitoring Survey Reveals Volunteer Motivations, Opportunities for Expanded Education
More than 25 monitoring programs across Montana engage volunteers in data collection. Their monitoring covers streams, rivers, lakes, and more, with some programs running for more than 20 years. To learn more about volunteer experiences and outcomes, professors Sarah Church and Adam Sigler from Montana State University worked with volunteer program coordinators in 2021 and 2022 to survey volunteers. Eighty-six people responded to the survey from nine volunteer programs across the state.
Most volunteers said they were motivated to volunteer because they care about their watershed and wanted to help protect it. Volunteers indicated that trainings were effective for learning monitoring methods and for learning about their watersheds. Through volunteering, participants most commonly reported increased knowledge about issues in their watersheds and how water quality is assessed.
Adam was very interested to learn from the survey that volunteers commonly did not feel they had learned about actions they could take to improve water quality in their watersheds. This indicates an opportunity to create education materials about what people can do to protect water quality and to emphasize these concepts during volunteer trainings and events.
Eighty-eight percent of volunteers said they talked to someone else about their participation with the monitoring program. Knowing that most water monitoring volunteers talk to others about their experiences indicates potential education/engagement impacts that extend beyond those who directly participate.
You can read reports with the full survey results for 2021-2022 here. This and other great water monitoring resources are available in the MWCC Monitoring Library.
The survey will be available again in the fall of 2024. Any volunteer monitoring program coordinators interested in participating and having their volunteers take the survey should reach out to Adam (asigler@montana.edu) and/or watch the MWCC Watershed News for announcements.
