This article appeared in the SSA eMpirical No. 19 - After the Conference.

At our 2007 Campus Activist Training, we had leaders from the Campus Atheists, Skeptics and Humanists present on the tremendous success they have had using Facebook as a recruitment tool for their group.

CASH Publicity Coordinator Aaron Halfaker says "the single most successful recruitment strategy we've ever employed was to search for students who identify as atheist, agnostic, humanist, etc. and invite them to join the CASH Facebook group. We did this before our first 'new member' meeting in Fall 2006, and over 70 people showed up--more than half of them as a direct result of our unsolicited group invitations."  This method is easy, free, targeted, and empirically demonstrated to be effective.

Andy Buttler, CASH Treasurer and SSA Board member, passes along these guidelines for successfully implementing Facebook recruitment:

1) First (obviously) make sure your organization has an active Facebook group, and that upcoming events and useful information are posted there and kept current.  Check out CASH's Facebook group (you must be logged into Facebook for this link to work).

2) Do an advanced search under "Religious Views" and invite people to join the Facebook group.

3) Split up invitation duty among several officers. There's a limit on how many people you can invite per day (50? 100? Something like that.)

4) Search for as many "identifiers" as you can think of. (Not just atheist and agnostic, but skeptic, Pastafarian, 'none,' etc. one CASH member's profile says "Religious Views: no." Another CASH member's says 'I Am God.' Get creative!)

This article appeared in the SSA eMpirical No. 19 - After the Conference.