Registration

Developing the Enrollment Form

To enroll people in the Sun Camp program we needed to develop a registration form for the website. However, it wasn't as simple as asking for email and address. There is data we need to capture about who is participating in the program and where they were from. Since we're enrolling both families and groups, we need the form to accommodate both situations. Because we were providing free supply kits, we need to determine which registrants met our criteria of serving children experiencing poverty or from traditionally marginalized groups without access to high-quality STEM programs. And, of course, we wanted to do this in a way that was clear, concise, and not condescending.

I met with our manager of impact strategy. Nahima is a data expert who helps the team best shape the audience's access to and interaction with our programming. She tests the best ways to interact with the audience and communicate with them. She knows what information we'll need to report on later to our funders and what information will be useful in crafting the best experience for our participants. She also helps us analyze data from a program and reports relevant information on the Science Friday website, so that others can learn from our experience. Together we developed the registration form for Sun Camp.

Once folks started using the form, we found some things to improve upon. At first, it seems folks weren't clear on the fact that if they were registering as a family they did not need to click a type of group. I attempted to make this more obvious with font formatting, but in the future, I may use a more powerful form generator (like SurveyMonkey) so that depending on if someone selects family or group they'll get a different set of questions. I also found that some school libraries of media centers did not want to click "library" so I changed that description as well. Lastly, I think I should have created a multiple-choice list for the number of children participating because not everyone just listed a number, which makes it hard to sort later.

Initial Demographic Information

I had to submit a snapshot of the early demographic breakdown of enrollment for NASA so I thought I would share those observations here as well. So here we go.

Science Friday opened registration for Sun Camp on September 28. As of October 7, we had 310 registrations representing 1550 children. We expect this will increase over the weekend because we included a call-out in the most recent Science Friday broadcast.

I did a quick look at the demographics we're seeing so far. Approximately 73% of registrants are families (representing 365 children) and over 12% identify as homeschoolers. There are indications that some of the single registrants may in fact represent homeschool groups or co-ops, so the number of children may be underrepresented.

Of the participating groups, in-school programs and libraries are the most common types of organizations representing 24% (~740 children) and 19% (~290 children) of group registrations respectively. In the last few days, we've seen registration by community groups and after-school programs increasing. We expect that to grow as a result of recent outreach.

17% of current registrants have a household income placing them below the poverty line. Another 19% have a household income under $50K. 40% of registrants identify as BIPOC or serve BIPOC communities. 47% of registrants identify as women or non-binary or serve those communities. Additionally, 20% of registrants are working with neurodivergent children and 12% with children with a disability.

Updated Demographics

We continued enrollment into the program through the five weeks of Sun Camp. When registration closed, 2,672 children were enrolled in the program. One shift that occurred over that time was a significant increase in the number of registered after-school programs. This followed an increase in in-class programs. Family registrations and homeschool groups continued to be strong participants with about 35% of children registered belonging to one of those two groups. Participation by Community groups continued to be small. This represents an opportunity for outreach in the future. Amny of the other demographic features of the audience remained relatively consistent as shown below.

I did take time to explore the social exclusion criteria more by the end of the program. I did this so that I could ensure that the activities and presenters I was offering meshed with my audience's needs. By the end of the program, we found that roughly 53% of participants did not meet any of the criteria. About 23% met at one. The most common social exclusion criteria were women or non-binary participants. the second was BIPOC. We hope to get a better understanding of the participants' demographics by using a final survey of the audience after the program ends.