Purposive Facebook Recruitment Endows Cost-Effective Nutrition Education Program Evaluation.

Background: Recent legislation established a requirement for nutrition education in federal assistance programs to be evidence-based. Recruitment of low-income persons to participate and evaluate nutrition education activities can be challenging and costly. Facebook has been shown to be a cost-effective strategy to recruit this target audience to a nutrition program. Objective: The purpose of our study was to examine Facebook as a strategy to recruit participants, especially Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education (SNAP-Ed) eligible persons, to view and evaluate an online nutrition education program intended to be offered as having some evidence base for SNAP-Ed programming. Methods: English-speaking, low-income Pennsylvania residents, 18-55 years with key profile words (eg, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Food bank), responded to a Facebook ad inviting participation in either Eating Together as a Family is Worth It (WI) or Everyone Needs Folic Acid (FA). Participants completed an online survey on food-related behaviors, viewed a nutrition education program, and completed a program evaluation. Facebook set-up functions considered were costing action, daily spending cap, and population reach. Conclusions: With Facebook we successfully recruited low-income Pennsylvanians to online nutrition program evaluations. Benefits using Facebook as a recruitment strategy included real-time recruitment management with lower costs and more efficiency compared to previous data from traditional research recruitment strategies reported in the literature. Limitations prompted by repeated survey attempts need to be addressed to optimize this recruitment strategy. (JMIR Res Protoc 2013;2(2):e27) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]