The Bat Conservation Trust: Online Survey Into Public Attitudes Towards Bats

Background and Context

The Bat Conservation Trust launched a 3-year strategy built around five interconnected objectives:

• Discover: Build scientific evidence for bat conservation
• Influence: Guide decision-makers to support bats
• Act: Promote effective landscape and urban management
• Connect: Foster public appreciation of bats and nature
• Strengthen: Ensure a sustainable future for The Bat Conservation Trust, its staff, and volunteers

To support the ‘Connect’ objective, The Bat Conservation Trust commissioned M·E·L Research to conduct a large-scale nationally representative quantitative research to better understand public attitudes toward bats. This included developing and piloting a repeatable survey, establishing baseline data, and generating insights to guide audience targeting and strategic planning.

The Approach

An online survey was conducted among n=2000 UK adults and young people aged 16+. The survey was sampled to ensure results accurately reflected the general UK population, and weighting was applied to data to ensure the same.

The Outputs

M·E·L Research produced cross-tabulations including significance testing at 95% level of confidence to support analysis. A PowerPoint report was created to show results which included detailed sub-group analysis, to allow identification of populations most open to further education about bats, to understand barriers to appreciation and understanding of bats, to understand the extent of misconceptions about bats and sentiment around the role of The Bat Conservation Trust.