What is the best way to make sure that when the census form is delivered in the mail

this March, all residents -- particularly our hardest to reach -- fill it out and send it
back?

In the week following Haiti’s devastating earthquake, disaster agencies raised a record
$20 million through mobile giving.1 This explosion of philanthropic support illustrates
the power of cell phones to reach and quickly mobilize a broad audience. The City of
Philadelphia can leverage these very qualities to enhance census completion rates among
its hardest to reach residents. I propose a text message campaign run in partnership with
cell phone companies that provides users with incentives for completing their census
forms and getting other residents to do so.

Nearly everyone in the U.S. has a cell phone, or knows someone who does. According to
industry experts, 84 percent of U.S. households include at least one mobile phone.2 Pre-
paid cell phone subscriptions, which currently comprise ten percent of all mobile
services, represent the quickest growing segment of this market. As one might expect,
users of pre-paid cell phones differ “both demographically and behaviorally
from postpaid or contract subscribers.”3 A higher percentage of prepaid cell phone users
are poor, young, and members of ethnic minorities, as compared to postpaid subscribers.

Pre-paid cell phone subscribers share many characteristics of the population that the
Census Bureau has traditionally defined as “hard to reach” - undocumented immigrants,
residents who speak little English, impoverished families, and those with lower literacy
rates. While it is likely that cell phone penetration in hard to reach communities is less
than the U.S. average, outreach to pre-paid subscribers offers a valuable inroad into hard-
to-reach communities, and cell phones offer a viral marketing possibility that has yet to
be harnessed by the Census Bureau.

I envision a text message campaign sent to pre-paid subscribers in the City of

Philadelphia that A) allows them to complete their census form via text response, B)
provides an incentive for doing so, such as additional minutes or free text messages, and
C) offers increased rewards to users who forward the text message to five or more other
users. This is an effective and low-cost way to contact hard to reach residents and create
a fast-spreading marketing campaign that will increase census form completion rates.

Depending on the technical capabilities of the U.S. Census Bureau, it may not be feasible
to collect census responses via text message. In that case, text messaging can be
harnessed as a mobilization tool and/or users could receive rewards based on proof of
their census completion. There may be other implementation challenges that require
modifying or scaling back this idea. Yet, the basic premise remains the same: text
messaging is the next frontier in civic engagement and has the potential to elevate Census
participation from an obligation to a phenomenon.

1
Schonfeld, Erick. “With Mobile Giving To Haiti Passing $20 Million, Text Fundraising Comes of Age.”
TechCrunch, January 18, 2010.
2
Forrester’s North American Technographics Benchmark Survey, 2009.
3
Ask, Julie A., Gartenberg, Michael. “Prepaid Cell Phone Users: Are They Ripe for Google’s Picking?”
JupiterResearch/Ipsos Insight Wireless Consumer Survey, December 7, 2007.

Laura Horwitz 7/12/2013