Census Is Regarded as Just More Junk Mail

Hey you!

Yes, you.

Did you mail in your census form? You didn’t? You naughty, naughty citizen. Where’s your sense of civic pride and public responsibility? Don’t you know that the census is an integral part of tracking this great country we call America?

Actually, I’m getting fed up with the hectoring we citizens are being subjected to because of our comparatively lackluster census response rates. The Census Bureau reports that only 76% of us have mailed in our forms--a full 13 percentage points behind the 1980 census levels. The return rate for the longer form lags yet another six percentage points behind 1980.

Census Bureau Director Barbara Everitt Bryant blames citizen “apathy” as a key reason for the decline. She points out that the shortfall is consistent throughout the 50 states and that there’s a high correlation between census return rates and voter turnout levels--and we all know that voter turnout has been dropping like a stone. The director also notes that many people fear, incorrectly, that their responses may somehow become public and that their privacy will be violated.

The real possibility of an undercount, of course, scares the dickens out of money-hungry big-city mayors with the visions of subsidies dancing in their heads as well as megalomaniacal politicos just aching to gerrymander congressional districts.

With all due respect to the director and other census scolds, I don’t think that the American people are as apathetic or as dim as their public servants think they are. (In fact, I have to admire the bipartisan gall of a do-nothing Congress and President watching the savings and loans bleed hundreds of billions of dollars while we are the ones who get called apathetic). Americans have perfectly good reasons to treat the census as cavalierly as they have. Let’s look at some numbers:

In 1980, the total estimated U.S. population was 221.7 million. That year, the total number of pieces of regular, third-class bulk a.k.a. junk mail was roughly 22 billion. In 1989, the U.S. population was roughly 247.1 million and the total volume of junk mail, according to the U.S. Postal Service, was more than 50.7 billion pieces--and that doesn’t even include mailings from not-for-profit organizations.

In other words, while the population of the United States grew about 10% in the last decade, the total annual volume of junk mail increased almost 150%. For all intents and purposes, the census form has become just another piece of junk mail; an ugly little gray envelope that is as intrinsic and inviting as yet another financial services circular from Merrill Lynch. It’s a nuisance and Americans don’t like nuisances.

“What we see and a trend that’s being seen all through the survey response field is where a decade ago you’d get telephone survey response rates of more than 80%, today, 65% to 66% is regarded as a good participation rate,” says Andrew R. McGill, a group vice president with Sandy Corp., a Troy, Mich., company that does customer research for such giants as Nissan, Ford and General Motors.

People are “just tired of getting called,” says McGill. Is it really irrational for Americans to get fed up with a high-volume diet of surveys, inquiries and questionnaires? Let’s not forget that in virtually every story you read about the census, it’s being described as a treasure trough of data just waiting for the direct-mail marketeers to snuffle through. Reality dictates that the results of the 1990 census will launch yet another deluge of junk mail and micromarketing appeals. Is it any surprise that this prospect generates something less than enthusiasm? What the Census Bureau is seeing isn’t apathy, it’s a population that is past the point of diminishing returns when it comes to cooperating with yet another poll taker.

“I don’t think the census has to be another piece of junk mail,” says Vincent P. Barabba, who ran the 1980 census and is now General Motors’ executive director of market research and planning. “But there is a lot of clutter out there.” Barabba mentions that Bryant was relatively new to the job and didn’t have the time to form a team to promote census participation in the way he was able to a decade ago.

But let’s also remember a few other points: The census remains a tasty and expensive morsel of political pork that provides hundreds of thousands of temporary jobs for people who just happen to know somebody. That always inspires citizen cooperation. What’s more, any professional demographer and statistician will tell you that we don’t really need to tap every single residence of the United States to paint a statistically accurate portrait of what the population looks like. Besides, if the census were really all that important, it wouldn’t have been too difficult for the President, Barbara Bush and Millie the Dog to tape a couple of public service announcements.

The truth is that, while times have changed, the census hasn’t. With the feeble exception of a toll-free hot line number, there has been little creativity or innovation in the way this census was handled versus a decade ago. Whose fault is that? The only surprise here is that people are surprised. Better luck next time.