Insight, Analytics and the New Marketing
The US Census – Mother of all Surveys
Posted 2010.06.23
Imagine this – a Census worker walks on dirt road deep in the woods somewhere in North Michigan. After half an hour she reaches a bungalow, the 1st sign of life she’s seen in a while. Just as she pulls out her new 2010 Census form she sees a bag hanging from the doorknob. In it she finds a Census from 2000 … .
This is the story Dr Robert Groves used at the beginning of his presentation at the ARF Audience Measurement Conference in NY yesterday. He runs the US Census Bureau, the government bureau in charge of surveying every household in the US once every 10 years. The Census is used to obtain the vital demographic statistics that are necessary for government planning. Dr Groves’ story and subsequent presentation showed that it is probably one of the biggest logistical exercises in the world.
The scale of the operation is pretty incredible. The government sends out the questionnaires to 140 million households and looks for a 100% completion rate. In this year’s Census 72% of the US households mailed their survey back. That is the same response rate they had when they did the last census 10 years ago. Any direct marketer would dream of having response rates at the same level of 10 years ago so this was a phenomenal achievement. A 1% drop in response rate would have cost the Government $80 million. This is because if you don’t respond by mail, they will send around someone to your house to ask you to fill out the questionnaire. They have a small army of 600k census workers following up on the 47 million households who didn’t respond. This in-person follow-up visit costs the government on average $57. (This includes the costs of handling the 300 assaults on census workers committed by anti-government minded non-responders!). The cost of a response by mail is only 42 cents so with these economics it became crucial for Dr Groves’ team to drive up the response rate.
They did this in a number of ways. First they made the questionnaire shorter which always drives up response rate. Then they added 2 touches to their communications cadence. They sent out a pre-announcement card before the questionnaire was sent and they sent out an extra reminder after the 1st questionnaire was sent. This apparently consumed the entire printing capacity of the US!! They also paid a lot of attention to language. The questionnaire came in 6 languages and they had completion guides for an additional 59 languages! They also activated 250 thousand grass roots organizations who would work in the local communities to ask people to fill out the questionnaire. This according to Dr Groves was one of the main contributors to the high response rate.
Then they did a marketing campaign which cost them $350 million, an investment they could easily show the positive ROI of (all they needed to achieve break even was a 4% increase in response rate …). This was a fascinating campaign, perhaps the biggest multicultural campaign ever. It included a K-12 campaign designed at informing children of immigrant families about the Census. These children are often the 1st to learn English in the household and can therefore be the main influencers. The campaign was run by a consortium of ethnic agencies who had to buy media in 28 languages, including Farsi, Armenian, Uruguayan etc. I saw Khmer videos, Indonesian outdoor ads and native Hawaiian posters. I have never seen localization at that scale.
Equally impressive was the use of real time tracking, modeling and optimization. Dr Groves’ team implemented daily tracking studies and performed statistical analysis every night to determine the effect of their media investment on awareness and behavioral intent. This allowed them to identify pockets of the population that were lagging behind. 18-24 year olds were an example. They tend to think the Census is not for them – that it is only for old people … . The team saw this very quickly and acted immediately by sending out targeted messages and by activating grass roots organizations. Dr Groves said the government saved 100’s of millions of dollars through real time tracking and optimization.
At the end of the presentation we got a sneak peak at some early results. The big trends shouldn’t come as a surprise. The population will grow from 309m to 439m in 2050. 20% of all households will be over 65 years old in 2050. There will be significant growth in the Hispanic population from 8% in 1980 to 30% in 2050. The Asian population will grow significantly as well. Apparently 47% of the national fertility in the next decades will come from minorities. We could also see the emergence of a bi-modal income distribution with an increasing gap between 90th and 10th income percentile – $138k vs $12k.
The US Census is a remarkable project. In terms of scale it is maybe only rivaled by the Indian Census which, as I found out on my trip to Bangalore last week is scheduled for the first time in 2011. Imagine surveying a billion people, a large portion of which live in remote, underdeveloped rural areas. I wouldn’t want to be in charge of that job!
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Great information! I’ve been looking for something like this for a while now. Thanks!
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