In a bold move, the City of Detroit plans to invest $3.2 million into promotional materials and efforts for the Census 2020. Just like the previous counts, there will be t-shirts, pens, and more that residents can have. There’ll also be social media and radio ads, billboards, and door-to-door visits. Every person must receive an acknowledgment, or else $5,500 ($55,000 over ten years) won’t be collected. These funds are crucial when it comes to the progression of Detroit.
Vicky Kovari, director of the Census 2020 campaign says the census holds a lot of weight, especially for a city like Detroit. “There’s a lot at stake,” said Kovari, “No matter how you feel about the politics of the city, how you feel about your neighborhood, whatever the ways you feel, that the Census is critically important. It impacts all of us.” The campaign has turned to rap superstar Kash Doll, and others to encourage Detroiters to complete the census. “The 2020 Census is for everybody, period,” is what a promo billboard says in Detroit featuring Kash Doll.
90% of Detroiters live in hard-to-count areas. This percentage is due to systematic and environmental issues such as abandoned homes, internet access, and impoverished neighborhoods. Recently, Detroit was named the country’s most hard-to-count city. The promo campaign for Census 2020 will include:
- 100 billboards across the city featuring faces of well-known residents.
- Signage and literature at businesses, churches, and schools in hard-to-count areas.
- “Census Sundays” events at up to 100 churches across the city, where teams with tablets will help residents fill out the survey. The Census is available online for the first time this year.
- Another round of door-knocking in March to again target tens of thousands of homes.
- Census assistance locations at public libraries and rec centers.
- Census prompts on public computers at each public library.
- Census kiosks next to Detroit’s DivDat machines, where residents pay water, tax, and other bills. The DivDat machines, which facilitate about 100,000 transactions per month, will prompt residents to the kiosks.
- Census-based lesson plans to be taught throughout the city’s school district on April 1, National Census Day.
- Radio ads and online videos featuring a broad cross-section of the population discussing the census, including videos in Spanish, Arabic, and Bengali.
- Adding thousands of addresses to Census records. To do this, teams visited apartment buildings known for undercounts to find their unit configurations.
The money for the campaign is on behalf of philanthropists and investors. The city pledged $600,000 to the campaign, while the state will spend an average of $10 to $15 million on promoting the census.
Census 2020 will be the first to occur during the boom of social media and the first census that residents can go and fill out the documents online. Detroit utilizing millennials as spokespersons for the census will allow the message to spread through pictures and videos. Twenty years ago, Census 2000 took place on April 1, 2000, three months removed from Y2K. Census 2000 was the first time persons could check as many boxes as necessary to identify their race. Census 2010 was one of the shortest in history, including only ten questions on the document.
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