Census Bureau Adapts Operations To Ensure Everyone Is Counted

As the Census Bureau monitors the impacts of COVID-19, they are deploying changes to operations to ensure the safety of staff and the public while maximizing the number of households that respond on their own. As of August 14, over 63.5 percent of households have returned the census. People can still respond online, over the phone, or by mail, without meeting a census taker.

• The Census Bureau is training census takers to follow up with households by phone, with phone numbers for both landlines and cellphones assigned to houses on the Bureau’s address list. 

• Census takers have begun following up with households nationwide and will continue to follow up with nonresponding households in person. If no one is home when the census taker visits, the census taker will leave a “Notice of Visit” with information about how to respond online, by phone, or by mail. 

• To encourage more households to respond on their own, the Census Bureau is contacting nonresponding households by mailing a seventh mailing, including a paper questionnaire, in late August to early September to the lowest-responding census tracts. 

• The Census Bureau will be sending emails to households in low-responding areas to encourage response. The emails will go to all households with a response rate lower than 50 percent, should be 20 million households with messages coming from [email protected]and will give recipients the option to opt-out of receiving future messages.