Community surveys are a powerful tool that can help local stakeholders deepen their understanding of local needs and priorities and involve community members in local planning. Yet traditional survey-fielding methods—such as outreach by phone and mail—can be logistically, technically, and financially challenging for agencies or offices with limited capacity and resources. This report shares key insights and provides recommendations for community planners and stakeholders about using Facebook as a recruitment tool for fielding online surveys based on what we learned from our study of upward mobility from poverty in eight US counties.

Why It Matters 
As response rates from traditional survey methods decline, survey recruitment is more challenging and survey costs increase. It is important to explore other survey-recruitment options that can reach pools of available potential respondents while achieving traditional survey goals, such as getting a representative sample. This report can help local leaders looking to administer community surveys who wish to consider a more cost-effective and more easily self-administered alternative to traditional survey methods: using social media for survey recruitment.

What We Found
Our findings suggest that community organizations or groups exploring the use of Facebook to field surveys should engage the following strategies: 

• Incorporate adequate lead time for establishing the survey to offer more flexibility and time to test different campaign strategies.
• Monitor campaign and survey analytics with enough frequency to ensure you are achieving your response goals, adequately monitoring for and responding to potential scam activity, and reviewing and responding to participants’ messages and questions.
• Err on the side of engaging yet simple Facebook ad designs, as Facebook can reject more complex ads.
• Consider that broader filters for geography or population characteristics (e.g., residents in a particular county) can result in a larger pool of potential respondents and a larger number of completed surveys, so it is important to set the selection criteria as wide as possible to support survey goals.
• Establish mechanisms or processes to identify and screen out scam activity as well as ways to manage and respond to scammers who may make it through established screens.

We also detail the following recommendations to save on costs: 

• Target ads to the largest population and geographic scale possible that will still meet survey goals and needs.
• Manually process incentives to offer a line of defense against scam respondents who complete the survey.
• Build or leverage local credibility and trust by partnering with local community organizations to support survey advertising, where possible and appropriate.
• Pilot test different survey campaigns, because certain characteristics—such as target population, geography, or the time of day ads are run—can affect costs per click.
• If in line with survey goals, limit the use of targeting categories, quotas, or other mechanisms that constrain eligibility, such age, race and ethnicity, or gender.

How We Did It 
To understand the opportunities and limitations associated with fielding online surveys through Facebook recruitment, Urban researchers designed and fielded an 18-question online survey and advertised it in eight US counties from May to August 2022. We ran multiple Facebook ad campaigns and collected data from community residents online using Qualtrics. We designed ads to more frequently hit zip codes with higher rates of residents of color to aid in getting a diverse set of respondents.