Skagway Xmas Bird Count participants

[Furbish - Klensch]

For all who have participated in a Skagway CBC - please see message below.  Thanks!

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Thank you for your dedication to the CBC. As you know, one of Audubon’s goals is inclusive engagement of birders with different backgrounds, such as during the annual counts. For this reason, we have received funding from the National Science Foundation for a partnership with North Carolina State University and a program called Inclusive, Diverse, Equitable, Accessible, Large-scale (IDEAL) Participatory Science program. We believe that participating in the IDEAL program will help us ensure that the CBC is engaging ALL who want to learn about and care for birds and their habitats.

As our next step with the IDEAL program, we are asking you to distribute a survey to your CBC volunteers. The survey is about participants’ sense of belonging, socio-demographics, and lived experiences. There has been no previous comprehensive effort to gather information about those engaged in our community or participatory science programs. The IDEAL Survey fills this gap.  Collecting demographic data about participants is important for several reasons. For example, it can affirm the project’s commitment and accountability to equity and inclusion by understanding socio-demographics. It can also help leaders to function with more awareness of identities and characteristics of participants, and help leaders determine who is already actively engaged in the project and which identities are missing. 

The IDEAL team will provide a general CBC-wide report back as well as a specific report for your Count circle(s) that includes summaries of the information pertaining to the questions asked in the survey. These summaries will be provided in a way that ensures participant privacy, with each individual person remaining anonymous and the results disaggregated so assumptions about individuals can’t be made.

Here is the direct link to the survey: https://ncsu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eyXAJvzXuo9UlSe?Participant=CBC&Treatment=CONTROL
 
Please send out an email to invite your CBC volunteers to take the survey by next Tuesday, August 6^th. Participants will then have four weeks to complete the survey before it closes on Tuesday, September 3^rd. Below is a template of an email that you can use to invite your CBC volunteers to the survey. You may modify it based on your familiarity with your volunteers, and we would appreciate if you could send out 1-2 reminders during that four week period to help increase the response rate. As a participant in the CBC, we hope you will take the survey too!

Thanks for your help with this project!

Best,
Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count Team