Digital Media Communications & Outreach for Census Turnout
Context:
Every ten years, the United States Census Bureau conducts a count of everyone living in the U.S., informing where hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding will go for communities all over the country. Census data impacts more than 100 programs, including Medicaid, Head Start, block grant programs for community mental health services, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, for the next ten years. The City of Rochester and Monroe County government bodies, along with the U.S. Census Bureau, convened a Complete Count Committee which included representatives from both city and county government, census bureau representatives, state representatives, non-profits, businesses, advocacy groups, media and marketing agencies, and educational institutions to develop outreach strategies that will focus on increasing census response turnout. Black and Brown communities, refugee / immigrant communities, and low-socioeconomic communities are historically under-counted every decade.
Census Video Commercials
Role: Creative Direction, Script Writing, Community Advocacy and Strategy
Setting the scene:
The communications team and census outreach campaign team wanted to develop short video commercials that would actually resonate with communities. Respective to aesthetics, we aimed for the videos to take place outside in a sunny environment. The videos would also be shot in familiar common neighborhoods as a backdrop, to give a feel of familiarity and community.
Script writing
For the script, we wanted them to be very short but impactful -- not overbearing so people don’t tune out, but interesting enough to hold people’s attention. We filmed four census video commercials -- and for each video, the script differed depending on the audience we aimed to reach.
Community advocacy and strategy
As stated prior, Black and Brown communities, refugee / immigrant communities, and low-socioeconomic communities are historically under-counted every decade. Understanding this, we focused on four segments of the community:
Refugee / immigrant community
Spanish speaking communities
Black / African-American community
Mothers with young children
For each video, we chose people who are active / present in the Rochester community -- advocates, non-profit / government workers, community leaders, radio staffers, etc. This way, we could center and focus on notable influencers in the community, that could then resonate authentically within each chosen demographic community, respectively.
By choosing these four foci areas, I wanted these videos to be culturally responsible and strategic. Every decade, these specific communities are undercounted in the U.S. census. By having members of these communities speak to how important an accurate census count is, we aimed to reach those who have not yet filled out their own census in an organic, familiar way.
Once the videos were filmed and produced, the actual outreach of the content itself was even more pertinent. Facebook is a dominant form of communication for many communities of color (Black, Latinx, etc.). For the Black and Latinx videos, we made sure to circulate the videos in these online community groups, in addition to encouraging influencers in the community to share within their networks. So in addition to rotating these videos on the City of Rochester’s socials (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) and via paid advertisements online, we circulated these videos to community groups that would then circulate them with their own circles.
I spoke with community groups that work with refugee / immigrant populations. From these sessions I learned that the refugee / immigrant community uses the app WhatsApp as a central means of communication with friends and family both home and abroad. Knowing this, we worked with advocates to circulate the refugee / immigrant census video in large WhatsApp chats in Rochester to increase awareness about how important the census is.
Census Counts - Phone Banking / Text Banking
To increase more awareness about the census and encourage community members to fill it out, The City of Rochester partnered with the organization Census Counts to host several phone and text banking sessions.
For these text banking and phone banking sessions, we centered on zip codes where there were severely low census response rates. Using data from U.S. Census Bureau, I mapped out what the current census response rates were for the City of Rochester and adjacent suburbs. In August 2020, the city of Rochester, NY's response rate was significantly lower than adjacent suburbs. With the exception of East Rochester, every suburb listed was above 70% in response rate for their respective census count. Focusing on the zip codes in the City of Rochester’s low responding regions, we drafted a script for phone banking, as well as text banking to get out the census count and increase response rates.
In August 2020, the city of Rochester, NY's response rate was significantly lower than adjacent suburbs. With the exception of East Rochester, every suburb listed was above 69% in response rate for their respective census count.
Below are some other infographics I created for the City of Rochester’s social media content, so as to keep the importance of the 2020 census on people’s radar. Additionally, I curated content for the City Of Rochester’s census webpage, that has key info about the census, FAQS, GIS mapping dashboard to track low response census tracts, and other pertinent information regarding the census - https://www.cityofrochester.gov/2020census/
Our census email was monitored by me, and I was able to reach and engage with the older populations of Rochester who use email as a central medium of communication using census@cityofrochester.gov.
Causewave Community Partners - Outreach Campaign
This is a local marketing and communications agency who spearheaded a campaign to increase 2020 census response rates. We also worked with other media / marketing agencies in the Complete Count Committee, one of them being Causewave.
For their campaign, I worked on organizing students, advocates, and other community members to speak candidly and organically about the census, and why it matters.
After speaking with a plethora of community groups, agencies, and local community members, we were able to produce a video promoting the census, which I also featured in.
