Case Study: How the Census Made a Hard Pivot When the Pandemic Hit An interview with Kaile Bower, Executive Director, Business Operations Staff, Communications Directorate, U.S. Census Bureau Background: Communication has always been key to the success of the decennial census. As part of every census, the U.S. Census Bureau embarks on a nationwide effort to encourage everyone to respond online, by phone or by mail. And that means everyone: It needs to reach into every community possible across the 50 states and five territories. As part of the 2020 campaign, the communications team focused on continuously monitoring and optimizing its efforts to drive the highest response possible. Years in the making, the campaign plan was ramping up for the final big push when the pandemic hit, forcing the communications directorate to rethink its plans. In an interview with GovLoop, Kaile Bower, who led the Campaign Optimization Review Team, discussed how the team adapted to the rapidly changing situation. The responses were lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
GovLoop: When did you realize that you needed a new strategy?
What steps did you take to formulate a new strategy?
Bower: It was about mid-March 2020 when
We were lucky in one sense. We had already established a cadence of daily meetings, seven days a week. We were briefing leadership every day as well, to let them know what we were seeing, and we had a great team of contractors we were working with who were experts in the media. We were able to stop and say, “How are we going to pivot? If you’re not leaving your house, how do we connect with you?”
the government basically shut down and sent everyone home. As that happened, we realized that the modes of communication that we had planned may not be the best for the new situation. We had billboards in high-transportation areas as people were commuting to and from work. And we had to realize that people weren’t going to be commuting for a while. So, how do we reach those people that we thought would be seeing those billboards, or listening to the radio on their drive to and from work? But our job didn’t change: We still had to make sure that we reached every person in the country to let them know how important this job was for them to fill out their census. We needed to stop and say, “How do we reach these people? What do we need to do to change the way we’re communicating?”
One thing we ended up doing was advertising on pizza boxes, because we knew people were getting home delivery of food. Also, we had had all these materials set up for partnership events – for our people who were on the ground who would be going to music festivals or community events and handing out census information, bags with the Census name and website on them. All of those were shut down. So we worked with the local communities that were
A GovLoop Guide 20
