#FacebookHack: Add an Email List Sign Up Form to Your Facebook Group Page

If you use Facebook Group for your club’s social media channel then you may know that you don’t have some of the bells and whistles that Facebook’s Pages functionality has like allowing you to create a call to action button. That call to action button can be used for things like signing up for your email list or donating to your fundraising project. Never fear! You can make your email sign up form available on your page. Here are the steps to perform that hack on your page.

Setup A Facebook Email Form on Your Facebook Groups Page from SUSAN MOORE on Vimeo.

Instructions to Setup a Google Mailing List Form

What You’ll Need: A Google account

Here are the instructions for the steps shown in the video:

1. Go to Google Forms
2. Click the Blank icon with the plus sign to create a new form. A new form appears.
3. Click in the field Untitled Form and give the form a name (I recommend Join Our Mailing List). This will describe the purpose of the form for alumni who enter their email address.
4. Click in the upper left hand field to make the name of the form the name it will be saved under in Google Forms.
5. Add a form description. This will give the person filling in the form a little more info about what you are collecting and why. I recommend something like “Share your email address with us and we’ll add you to our club’s email list. We never share or sell this list and we only use it to let you know about club news and events!“
6. Click in the field titled Untitled Question and enter Name. This will become the field where the alum’s name is captured.
7. Click on the Required toggle button to make the Name field required.
8. Click the + sign to the right of the form to add a new question.
9. Click in the field titled Untitled Question and enter Email Address. This will become the field where the alum’s email address is captured.
10. Click on the Required toggle button to make the Email Address field required.
11. Click on Responses at the top of the form to go to the Responses view.
12. Click the green icon to create a new Google Sheet. Store the email addresses in a Google Sheet rather than just the form. This will allow you to add other names and email addresses that you may collect on your sign up sheet or through emails directly into the spreadsheet.
13. Click the Send button in the upper right hand corner of the form.
14. Click on the icon to display the form’s URL.  The URL will be very long.
15. Place a check in the checkbox below the URL in the Shorten URL box. This will shorten the URL. Note: you can share this URL in other places to capture email addresses such as a website, a Twitter post, etc.
16. Click the Copy button in the lower right hand corner of the box to copy the link to your clipboard.

Instructions to Add the Mailing List Form to Your Facebook Group

What You’ll Need:  You must be an administrator of your club’s Facebook page.

1. Go to your club’s Facebook page. (Note: these next steps will only work if you have setup your club’s page.)
2. Right click in the post field and select Paste. The Google form URL will be pasted into the field.

3. Once the URL preview has appeared, remove the URL and replace it with text that describes the email list form such as “Join our mailing list to get all the latest club news and events!”

4. Click Post. The post will appear at the top of the Facebook wall.

5. Click on the arrow in the upper right hand corner of the new post. Select Pin Post from the menu.

6. The post is pinned to the top of the Facebook’s wall. As other posts are added, they will appear below this pinned post, which will continue to appear at the top of the Facebook wall until it is unpinned.

Do you have questions about this Facebook hack? Is there another Facebook hack you’d like to see covered? Let me know!