Scouts, Sunglasses : Data Junkies Count Ways to Use Census

Call them census-data junkies, a billowing multitude so diverse that it encompasses the Rev. Paul Kuntzman of Louisville, Ky., Boy Scout leader Robert Burt of Overland Park, Kan., and sunglass executive Dick Enholm of Leominster, Mass.

They share a talent for making imaginative but practical use of the zillions of statistics churned out by the U.S. Census Bureau: Kuntzman, to recruit church members; Burt, to organize Scout troops for Latinos and Vietnamese Americans; Enholm, to gauge how many pairs of sunglasses to make in Massachusetts and how many in Mexico.

Ever since the Census Bureau began putting its numbers on computer tape about a decade ago, Americans have been using them in increasingly sophisticated ways.

Attracting Younger Families

“By drawing on census data, we are gaining younger families who are moving into the community,” said Kuntzman, who sometimes sounds more like a demographer than pastor of the Bethel United Church of Christ. “Using maps and plotting population movement have helped us to define our maximum effective client group.”

Out of the deluge of census data has grown an entire industry dedicated to repackaging the information for clients ranging from corporations to churches.

The Census Bureau, said John Beresford, a former bureau official who runs Dual Comm Inc., a private data firm in Washington, “has the only data base that counts right down to the city block. It’s a godsend.”

As census director, John G. Keane has been promoting ever wider use of his products and is proud of the results. One of his favorite examples: The Canadian government resorted to census data to expand turnout for Pope John Paul II’s visit to Winnipeg last year. “They took our data on ancestries most prone to Catholicism and used it to mount an appeal in those states that are close to Manitoba,” he said.

Bending Too Far

The Census Bureau’s efforts have triggered charges, mostly from academics, that the bureau bends too far to facilitate use of its data by business.

Andrew Hacker, a political scientist at Queens College in New York who advocates restricting the use of census statistics to governmental purposes, said: “There is something amiss when I tell the government that I work and have young children, and then I’m subjected to an advertising campaign by Pampers.”

Harvard sociologist Paul Starr protests that private data companies are charging dearly for publishing the data they collect from census computer tapes. “Researchers, students or curious citizens who want to see the data must be able to pay such firms the high prices they demand,” he complained.

To counter the criticism, the Census Bureau has increased low-cost public access to its mounds of numbers. It has expanded its 12 regional offices and supplied state-run “data centers” with full sets of state census statistics, including printed reports, computer tapes, microfiche, software and reference materials.

The bureau’s County and City Data Book, profiling every county and every city with at least 25,000 residents, costs only $24, contrasted with the hundreds of dollars that a real estate investor recently told the Los Angeles regional Census Bureau office he had to pay a private data firm for the same information. The bureau’s data tapes, with unpublished information, cost $150 a reel.

The regional offices, staffed with census specialists, receive more than 100,000 phone calls a year from data users. Naturally, they tabulate where the calls come from: 44% from businesses; 21% from federal, state and local governments; 17% from civic groups and individuals; 10% from academic institutions; 6% from the news media and 2% from libraries.

Diverse Requests

Beverly Wright, a specialist at the Census Bureau’s New York regional office, said she gets all kinds of requests: community groups seeking information to justify continued federal or state aid programs; nursing students preparing a regional health study; a local television station comparing the income and social characteristics of blacks and Latinos.

Kuntzman’s church in Louisville, which had been losing membership for more than a decade, plunged into census data because of a nationwide project mounted by its parent organization, the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries.

“We figured if McDonald’s and Wendy’s could make use of this stuff (to pick sites for new restaurants), there was no reason our local churches couldn’t,” said William McKinney, the board’s research director. He commissioned a private data firm to supply 5,600 member churches with a census profile of the communities they serve.

The board’s goals included helping its churches increase membership by recruiting among the most promising socioeconomic groups. “Statistics on income might show that members’ contributions could be stepped up to 5% or 10% of annual income from 2% or 3%,” McKinney added.

Attracting Couples

In the Louisville instance, Kuntzman found that his church’s congregation, heavily weighted toward the elderly, would grow only by seeking out upwardly mobile young couples. To attract them, the church has started three “couples’ groups” that meet once a month over potluck dinners in each other’s homes. “In the last year, we’ve added seven couples to our membership,” he said.

The Boy Scouts have also used census data to attract members. In the north-central region, associate director Burt learned partly from census data that Des Moines and Denver had few Scouts from their Vietnamese and Latino communities.

So he beefed up his staff to organize new troops in those areas. In Denver, the number of Latino Scouts jumped dramatically from 1% of the Scout-age Latino population to 18%. Impressed, Burt is now trying to get the Boy Scouts to offer a demographics merit badge.

Politicians are capitalizing on similar techniques. The Democrats, for example, are raising funds by emphasizing their stand on Social Security to voters who are homeowners approaching retirement age.

Business Uses

But the fastest-growing and most sophisticated use of census statistics has occurred in the business community.

“The Census Bureau’s decision to put 1970 data on computer tape and to make the tapes generally available to the public changed forever the way that American businesses plan and market their products,” said Cheryl Russell, research director of American Demographics Inc. in Ithaca, N.Y.

Russell said she knows a corporate planner who boasts: “I know where to build a store by standing on a property and watching the traffic. If I feel that flutter in my stomach, that’s where I put the store.” But for most businesses, Russell said, “Demographics have replaced the flutter in the stomach.”

CACI, a private data company in Arlington, Va., does more than help Kentucky Fried Chicken, Kroger and other firms find successful new locations for their consumer outlets. Stephen Tordella, CACI’s senior demographer, said his company can also tell its clients whether an existing store ought to offer different services, “such as a specialty food deli in an upscale neighborhood.”

Sunglass Information

Enholm, statistical chairman of the Sunglass Assn. of America, said import statistics available from the Census Bureau give the sunglass industry a “very valuable” view of market trends. A huge upswing in inexpensive imports has prompted his own company, Foster Grant, to increase production of cheap sunglasses at its Nogales, Mexico, plant while focusing more on expensive, scratch-resistant lenses at its Massachusetts factory.

Using census data, market researchers have developed a pair of extraordinary tools called “geo-coding” and “psychographics.”

Geo-coding represents a clever way of partly piercing the shield of confidentiality that protects everyone who answers census questionnaires every 10 years. A computer matches a list of individuals’ addresses with census data covering the same geographic area. Because census statistics are available in microscopic detail--all the way down to the census tract or city block--analysts can get a fairly good fix on a group of specific persons’ demographic characteristics.

While demographics refers to individuals’ vital statistics--such as age, sex, income and occupation--psychographics extends to life style, values, attitudes and personality traits.

Bank Uses Psychographics

For example, Russell noted, New York’s Citibank used psychographics to determine whether it would be more cost-efficient to open another branch in a well-to-do suburban county or to increase the number of automatic-teller machines instead. Working for Citibank, CACI geo-coded the bank customers’ addresses by census tract and produced a psychographic profile of the census tracts where the customers lived.

From this data, Citibank “discovered that its customers were young, innovative families likely to be oriented toward automatic-teller machines,” Russell said. “Citibank decided not to open another branch bank in the county but instead to beef up its non-branch delivery services there.”

Large newspapers, in their pursuit of new subscribers and advertisers, are deep into demographics and psychographics. The Los Angeles Times provides hundreds of free, census-based studies to advertisers telling them what kinds of customers--and how many Times subscribers--live in their trading areas.

“We can profile the people most likely to buy a Mercedes Benz and show where they live on a map,” said Patricia LoVerme, the paper’s marketing research manager. “Then we can show The Times’ reader penetration in those areas. Thus, we can say, ‘Our customers are yours, and you should buy with us.’ ”

Affirmative Action Data

Many companies with federal contracts are using census statistics to prove they are achieving affirmative action goals in hiring and promoting women and minorities.

“Let’s say you’re accused of having too few blacks,” said Beresford, whose data firm has done studies for Procter & Gamble and other companies. “If you can show that your company is doing better than the national or regional average, you have a pretty good defense.”

In Los Angeles, the Directors Guild of America obtained census data on the number of blacks, Latinos and women in the area to prepare an affirmative action plan for behind-the-camera positions in the movie and television industries.

The federal government is the original user of census data; the Constitution requires a census every 10 years as the basis for drawing congressional districts. The government also uses census information to allocate funds for such grant programs as highway construction, school aid and sewer construction.

Uncovered ‘Redlining’

Census data can provide the government with an investigatory tool. Federal bank examiners in the Midwest once hired a data firm to help uncover “redlining”--the practice of rejecting loan applicants in certain neighborhoods.

On the local level, Seattle mass transit planner Rick Walsh has fed census and other data into a computer to estimate the impact of potential bus and rail lines. He said census statistics have also been used to plot specialized van service for the elderly and disabled.

In New York City, researchers from the Health Systems Agency spent three weeks poring over census data to determine whether young doctors receiving state and federal grants were properly deployed in areas of physician shortages.

And in Boston, the city’s water agency analyzed data on clothes washers and dishwashers in developing a program to save 30 million gallons of water a day, according to Patricia Corcoran, chief planner at the Metropolitan District Commission.

Wield Data Effectively

Ingenious individual citizens also have been able to wield census data effectively.

When state officials wanted to spray a Seattle area for gypsy moths, a neighborhood association argued that the proposed chemical was particularly harmful to pregnant women, children and older persons--three large groups in their neighborhood, according to census data waved by the citizens. David Bricklin, the association’s president, said the state wound up substituting a bacterial spray, which proved effective.

At the Los Angeles regional office, information specialist John Ramirez said a woman in her late 30s, looking for a city to live in, dropped by Friday to gather information on the numbers of males per 100 females in Southern California cities. She had ruled out Los Angeles, where there were only 95.3 males per 100 females, and was thinking about San Diego, with a more favorable 103.6.