2010 Census Surveys Hit Mailboxes Today, After Largest Outreach in History
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Mar. 15–On Halloween, children in the small suburban city of West Park in Broward County got candy wrapped in the 2010 Census logo. For the holidays, the city printed up Census-branded calendars.

At every holiday, at every public event in the past several months, Census tchotchkes rained upon West Park’s 14,000 predominantly minority residents: mugs and cups, T-shirts, pens, canvas bags, door hangers. Pillboxes and first-aid kits for its seniors. And enough lawn signs for every home in the city.

On Monday, when Census questionnaires begin hitting 120 million mailboxes across the nation, “people in West Park can’t say that they don’t know about it,” said Vice Mayor Felicia Brunson, who spearheaded the drive and, on Saturday, led a Census parade through the city.

Probably no small municipality has done more to make sure every resident responds to the 2010 Census than West Park: it was not tallied in 2000 because it did not yet exist, and so was concerned about an undercount given its majority black, Hispanic and immigrant population.

But it’s far from an isolated example.

The West Park campaign, financed by six federal grants totaling $18,000, is just one small piece in what the Census Bureau describes as the largest civic outreach and awareness campaign in U.S. history.

The marketing budget alone is $326 million. It paid for a jokey $2.5 million Super Bowl spot starring Ed Begley Jr. for which the Census Bureau took some heat. The Census is sponsoring a NASCAR team. There have been ads in 28 languages, including spots by U.S. winter Olympic athletes like Cuban-American Miami speedskater Jennifer Rodriguez. A Census Road Tour criss-crossed the country, hitting NASCAR races, the Super Bowl in Miami, snowboarding competitions and the NBC Today show in New York.

Because children are often the Census’ entree into recently arrived families, Sesame Street characters Rosita and, naturally, The Count visited schools, including Nova Blanche Forman Elementary School in Broward.

Major national nonprofits, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and United Way, have joined in. So have retailers like Walgreens and Target, which is printing the Census logo on its shopping bags.

And a Spanish-language TV network wrote a Census theme into a popular soap opera.

But the campaign extends well beyond that to encompass 200,000 organizations, mostly focused on minority communities, that have signed up as unpaid “partners” to promote the importance of Census response by starting websites, knocking on doors, holding rallies, handing out fliers, sending out e-mails, and speaking on radio and TV. One group gave free iTunes downloads to people who promised to fill out their forms.

In a multimedia-saturated age, Census officials and boosters call the publicity campaign vital to the decennial headcount’s success.

The goal is to reverse a long-standing decline in mail-back rates for the forms, in particular from what Census official call hard-to-count groups: blacks, Hispanics, immigrants and the poor.

Census boosters say capturing as accurate a count as possible is, primarily, a question of fairness. It ensures political representation for all communities as well as an equitable distribution of Census-based federal services — nearly $500 billion annually for health care for the poor, highway construction, schools and housing assistance, among other programs.

But sending Census enumerators knocking on the doors of those who don’t return their forms costs taxpayers big money, too. Every 1 percent increase in the mail-return rate, which was about seven in 10 in 2000, saves the Census Bureau around $85 million, officials say.