Quite a few researchers depend on volunteers—who participate as subjects of a study or who help in the collection of data. If you are a scientist or graduate student in need of volunteers, you may have found it difficult to find and recruit people to participate in your study. Perhaps you advertised your study online or in a local paper and got little response. Or maybe you posted information on a website that lists clinical trials (needing volunteers to serve as study subjects) or research projects (needing observers/recorders of plants, animals, and the environment). On such sites, a potential volunteer can search for a topic of interest and then sign up for one of the studies. Many of these sites, however, offer only brief text descriptions of the research project, which often do not provide much insight about what the volunteer can expect or why the research is being done.

A way to make your study stand out and attract suitable volunteers is to create a brief video showing prospective volunteers what they will experience, what they might learn by participating, and how their contribution will help advance science. The video can be posted on a video-sharing site where people searching for information about a topic are more likely to find it. The video can be linked to the project website where someone can find out more about it and perhaps volunteer to participate in the study.

For example, here is a video about a study that does a great job of not only explaining the significance of the work, it shows the sampling procedure that a volunteer subject would experience:

I’m not crazy about the title, but it seemed to attract a lot of attention. You can read more about the study (or maybe volunteer?) here. This study of facial mites is part of a larger effort called Your Wildlife, which features citizen science and science education projects focused on familiar landscapes—from our own skin to our backyards.