My name is Antonio Ortega and I’m a professor and researcher at USC in Los Angeles, California.
With this email I am contacting you on behalf of the CoronaSurveys project (https://coronasurveys.org/). We got your email from our friends at Crowdfight, and we want to thank you for agreeing to serve as “ambassadors” and help us extend the reach of our surveys. Thanks!
You can find many details (and all our data and results!) in our webpage (https://coronasurveys.org/). In a nutshell, our research is based on deploying open surveys (anybody, anywhere can submit one), where each response gives us information about people known to the respondent. This is a unique feature of our approach: each response tells us about the status of 50 or more people. Our surveys are 100% anonymous and we strongly value preserving privacy. Thanks to Crowdfight these surveys are translated into many different languages. And they are available on the web or as Android, iOS apps.
But we need your help! Our goal is to increase the number of people who participate, so that we can have more reliable data, and also grow the number of countries where there are active respondents. Our estimates do not replace data obtained from testing. Instead they complement it, allowing us to get estimates where tests are unavailable or delayed, for example. Some of this has been described in our published work: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.12783
What can you do? We need your help to spread the word, and in particular to post about the project in your own language.
We are asking every ambassador to complete as many of the following tasks as possible:
1) Download one of our apps and give them a rating:
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/coronasurveys/id1514669450
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.coronasurveys.mobile&hl=en_US
2) Recommend those apps or our surveys to friends/family/colleagues.
3) Follow us on social media:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/coronasurveys
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coronasurveys/?hl=en
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/209076966867175
4) Help us recruit more ambassadors! You can ask them to contact me directly or forward their email to me and I will add them to our list: antonio.ortega@sipi.usc.edu
5) We have set up a Telegram account to communicate with all the ambassadors: https://t.me/CoronaSurveys
please request to joint it so that we can communicate more directly with you
6) We are open to your feedback about our surveys and to starting new local initiatives. For example we just deployed a local survey at Rivas/Arganda near Madrid, Spain:
https://survey.coronasurveys.org/?r=survey%2Findex&sid=28523&newtest=Y&lang=es&Country=RA
and we would be interested in helping cities and regions around the world with similar efforts. We also appreciate any other suggestions you may have!
On behalf of the team, we appreciate your help very much and we look forward to working with you! (And thanks for reading this long email too!)
Best wishes,
Antonio Ortega
