Retargeting Social Media Outreach for SNAP Take-Up

In a California field experiment, I investigated the impact of a Facebook outreach campaign aimed at increasing enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The campaign used a promising marketing strategy known as “retargeting,” where ads were delivered to a randomly selected subset of over 16,000 eligible nonparticipants who had nearly completed the SNAP application process, while a control group remained unaffected. Despite leveraging ad content developed in collaboration with nonprofit and government partners, the campaign did not produce statistically or economically significant increases in enrollment, even when considering the extreme values of estimated confidence intervals.

This paper was accepted by Jean-Pierre Dube, marketing.

Funding: This work was supported by Code for America and the National Institute on Aging [Grant T32-AG000186].

Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.06312.