Identification
Video tool
SCIENCE SHOPS
Video tool
Type of tool: Online engagement
Phase: Identification
ONLINE VOTING TOOL
Bottom-up selection of the research question
The Challenge
Imagine that through various activities you have gathered a bunch of possible research questions that caught people’s interest. You will now need to choose just one of them to address it in the next phases of your study.
Which one would you choose?
The Tool
Voting is the most powerful weapon in democracy. Organising a voting system ensures that the final decision on the research question to be selected is taken with the participants. But you have to make sure that the greatest number of people can access the survey. It is critical to raise awareness and disseminate the survey widely. You can use different strategies to achieve this.
Discover the tool in action!
Read the case study and understand how this tool has been used in a real citizen science project.
This year, we celebrate your participation. New Year's Eve survey
CitieS-Health Barcelona Pilot
What
It is an online campaign with a voting poll to choose among the 8 research questions which were co-created in previous activities of the Cities-Health Barcelona pilot.
Why
To select one research question among several possibilities.
To involve in the selection other people who did not participate in previous phases.
How
Design the online pool and its communication campaign.We designed a very short poll that went straight to the point. To disseminate it, we also create a communication campaign. This included some funny contents that can go viral. We prepared Tweets and WhatsApp messages that people could easily share within their groups. When the campaign was launched it was New Year's Eve holidays, so we drew on this to build our communication.
Involve people who participated in previous activities. In previous interactions, we gathered people's contact details and asked them for permission to send news on the project. This made it easier to send them the survey, ask them to vote and spread the word.
Reach people in the street and ask them to vote.We visited different neighbourhoods and asked passersby to vote. We asked them to do so with our tablet. If they wished for some privacy, they could vote by directly going to the poll's online link. For this, we had a QR code printed on a large paper and asked them to scan it.
Celebrate the results with a bit of suspense.People love suspense and parties. We organised a public event to announce the voting results. In order to get people interested in coming to our event, we published the results online only after the event had taken place. Those who came to the party were the first ones to see the results!