Our new eButterfly Projects tool allows you to easily and quickly create a hub for your event, club, class, or organization. An eButterfly Project creates a space for you that pools observations of eButterfly users together. You can automatically include all of the checklists and observations that fit the places, taxa, users, or dates that you specify. Whether you’re starting a community science effort, creating a home for your user group, or running a butterfly bioblitz; eButterfly Projects is the new tool for you.
Create a project to take advantage of these features:
- Easily create a branded hub for your club or organization.
- Customize your project with a banner, icon and description.
- Observations that fit parameters set by you are automatically added.
- Share your project with a unique web address.
- See user leaderboards, observation photos, and other statistics and visualizations, with more coming in the future.
- Add start and end date/times for butterfly bioblitz events. A bioblitz is an effort to record as many species and observations as possible within a designated place and time period.
Tips for Managing Projects
Projects are not for every situation. If you want to start a project to simply keep track of all observations recorded in a particular geographic area for yourself, you may find that using the filters on the Explore page is all you need. For example, if you just want to keep track of all of the butterflies in Ontario, Canada, you can just use the Explore page filtered by the location. But if you are looking to create a branded site and build community, then projects are for you!
- Clearly communicate the rationale of the project with the targeted community of users and on the about section (e.g. surveying a certain species or place, creating a presence and community for your organization, building a species list with a community for a location, running a butterfly bioblitz, and more).
- Be willing to put in the work to curate the data and the community.
- Recruit members to your project not only to collect data but to help with identifications and community-building.
- Run contests, organize meetups, or other events depending on the scale of your project. Themes like the “observation of the month” or observer challenges encourage interaction and friendly competition among project members.
- Acknowledge community members for their findings, however significant or insignificant.
- Start social media around your project page, and be sure to let us know so we can follow and amplify your posts!
This is just the beginning for eButterfly Projects! Soon, our new Projects tool will be adding support for Spanish and French, more project stats and visualizations, project blogging, and more! If you need any help with creating a project, please visit our Help and create a support ticket and we’ll help get you started!
Watch our screencast to learn how to setup your project on eButterfly.