Count Countdown: What marketers can look forward to in the 2000 Census.

Sometime by the end of the year, Americans will become intimately familiar with the phrase, “This is your future. Don’t leave it blank.”

This month the Census Bureau begins blaring the message in a $167 million promotional campaign for Census 2000, marking the first time the government has resorted to paid advertising to get people to fill out census forms. (The Bureau proposed running a sweepstakes, but decided against it due to legal hassles.) Census response rates dropped from 78 percent in 1970 to 65 percent in ’90, and the Feds are pulling out all the stops to forestall an anticipated slip to 61 percent in 2000.

That’s good news for marketers and their researchers. They can look forward to a more detailed accounting of ethnic groups, seniors, and kids – and to quicker reporting thanks to new technology. Here’s a rundown of what’s new in Census 2000.

COLLECTION

In 2000, the Census Bureau will be poking down every alleyway – literally – to count heads that were missed in ’90. Due to language and cultural barriers, groups such as African-Americans, Native Americans, Asians, and Pacific Islanders have historically been undercounted. Correcting that is the chief aim of the ad campaign, as is a partnership effort with local governments, “Complete Count Committees,” and Indian Tribal officials.

In rural areas, enumerators will canvass each block to record living quarters prior to the census. In schools, hundreds of thousands of census kits will be handed out to students and discussed in classes, since many heads of households neglected to list their children in the last census. Approximately 120 million questionnaires will be mailed to American households in March.

Census officials plan to be in possession of the most accurate U.S. address list ever compiled, but beware, direct marketers. Only bona fide officials may review it and, by law, it may only be used for purposes of the census.

Households on the list that do not reply will be contacted by phone or visited personally by a temporary data-gathering workforce of 600,000.

Expect census tabulations to be executed speedier than in ’90. Electronic data capture and intelligent character recognition (ICR) will allow the Bureau’s four processing centers to scan some 1.5 million sheets per day.

THE QUESTIONNAIRES

Most households will receive, via mail, a short form that takes only 10 minutes to fill out. It asks for name, sex, age, relationship to household, race, Hispanic origin, and whether the home is owned or rented.

One in six households will receive a long form, which takes an average of 38 minutes to complete and serves as a statistical sample to project more detailed information on the U.S. population. It will ask respondents to provide the following particulars:

Social characteristics: Marital status, place of birth, citizenship, year of entry, educational level, ancestry, residence five years ago, language spoken at home, veteran status, disability, and presence of grandparents as care-givers.

Economic characteristics: Labor force status, place of work, commute time, work status previous year, income, and industry and occupation.

Housing characteristics: Units in structure, number of rooms and bedrooms, plumbing and kitchen facilities, year built, year moved into unit, type of heating fuel, telephone, and vehicles.

The one new subject area added to the census is grandparents as care-givers.

DEEP-MINING ETHNICS

Census-takers are on a mission to tap deeply into the ethnic population, especially Hispanics, whose numbers have grown an estimated 35 percent since ’90 to more than 30 million.

Every household, despite which race box it checks, will be asked to identify whether it is or is not Hispanic. Hispanics will further be asked to indicate the specific ethnic group to which they belong, such as Cuban, Puerto Rican, Honduran, or Venezuelan.

For the first time, people with mixed racial heritage will be able to check off more than one racial designation. The categories are white, black or African American, American Indian, Alaska native, Asian, and native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander.

Households receiving questionnaires in the mail will have the option of requesting them in Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, or Korean. Speakers of other foreign tongues will be able to obtain Census 2000 Language Assistance Guides in nearly 50 languages, ranging from the common (French, German, Italian, Russian) to the obscure (Dinka, Tongan, Somali, Urdu).

RESULTS

By law, the Census Bureau must deliver state population counts to the President by Dec. 31, 2000, for the purpose of reapportioning seats in the House of Representatives. For local redistricting, the Bureau must provide states with race and ethnic data for smaller geographic areas by April 1, 2001.

Everyone else can tap into census stats using a new system called the American Fact Finder accessible via the Internet (call up census.gov, the Bureau’s Web site) and at thousands of State Data Centers and libraries.

Information will be obtainable in the form of profiles, printed reports, electronic files, microdata files, and summary tables.

Let the count begin!