Census Bureau updates its 2010 national nose count
HANO received a note from the Census Bureau on March 19 to fill us in on how the Big Count is going:
Just a quick update to let you know that by now census forms have been mailed or hand-delivered to nearly all households across the U.S., and we’re happy to report that the census is on time and on budget. Staying on budget will depend, of course, on mail participation and not having to send census takers out to households that didn’t mail back their forms.
If every household completed and mailed back their census form, taxpayers could reduce the cost of taking the census by $1.5 billion. We appreciate all of your efforts to ensure full participation from your community.
We are getting reports from a small number of communities that they are receiving census questionnaires that have a city in the address on the envelope that is different than what they usually see on their mail.
This does NOT mean that they will be counted in the city listed in the mailing address on the envelope. The census questionnaire contains a bar code that ensures that census respondents are counted at the physical location where they received their form, not the postal delivery address.
Biggest mailing in U.S. history
The 2010 Census mail-out is the largest single delivery ever undertaken by the United States – over 120 million forms. To streamline delivery in a mailing this large, packages of forms were sometimes lumped together under the same city name. This is not a problem; for every address there are multiple post office names that are perfectly acceptable for accurate delivery.
As long as the cities in question are served by the same post office, the forms are delivered correctly, and again, the actual physical location of the household is included in the bar code. Throughout the country the census forms are being delivered to the correct location, even those that do not have a city that people are used to seeing on their mail.
This year’s count aims to be the most accurate ever
The 2010 Census Address List is the most accurate ever compiled. Throughout the decade census employees have been building the census address list. This process included the massive effort to bring census maps into GPS alignment, regularly updating address information, and working with every municipality in the country to update boundaries and check addresses. This process culminated with census employees walking every street in America to make sure each household is in the correct geographic location long before the forms were addressed and mailed.
It’s all part of the Census Bureau’s mission to “Count Everyone Once – and Only Once – And In the Right Place.”
The Census Bureau will begin posting daily mail participation rates on our Web site next week. Visit the site now to see how your community did in Census 2000, and come back next week to get a daily rate tracker for your community you can embed on your own Web pages. Link: http://2010.census.gov/2010census/2000map/.
How nonprofits can get involved in the 2010 Census
Census forms have been mailed out. The time is now for nonprofits to help draw the portrait of America and define our communities for the next 10 years. Nonprofits Count, a project of the Nonprofit Voter Engagement Network, has listed five top ways for nonprofits to get involved with the 2010 Census:
1. Starting today, find and promote your local Questionnaire Assistance Center on the 2010 Census site
2. Starting today, track and promote your community response rate on 2010.census.gov
3. Log on to Nonprofits Count.org to access an online Census toolkit for nonprofits of fact sheets, multimedia, poster order form and other downloads
4. Find a map of contact information for local and regional Census offices at www.nonprofitscount.org
5. Advertise Census numbers for help on the 2010 questionnaire:
- English: 1-866-872-6868
- Chinese: 1-866-935-2010
- Korean: 1-866-955-2010
- Russian: 1-866-965-2010
- Spanish: 1-866-928-2010
- Vietnamese: 1-866-945-2010
- TDD (Telephone Display Device for the hearing impaired): 1-866-783-2010
- Puerto Rico (in English): 1-866-939-2010
- Puerto Rico (in Spanish): 1-866-929-2010
To contact the Nonprofits Count campaign, call (877) 4-1-COUNT and check out this NPR article, featuring Kyle Caldwell of the Michigan Nonprofit Association, on nonprofits gaining national recognition for their efforts around the 2010 Census.
