The Census Counts campaign was a collaborative effort involving organizations that live and work in the communities most at risk of being missed in the census. Through education, training, organizing, and outreach, these organizers and advocates work to ensure that the hardest-to-count communities are counted in the census.

Contributions included:

• Campaign branding, website, & social content – This campaign was established to serve as the hub for an intersectional group of organizations, and therefore needed its own look and content strategy.
• OOH ads targeting unhoused populations – We had $50K and merely a few days to get our message to a community who’s especially difficult to count: people without a permanent address. So we sent digital billboard trucks to support street teams in hyper-targeted encampment locations within cities across the country.
• Personal stories – Next Day Better helped us generate some early engagement around the census by humanizing a variety of people the census directly impacts.
• Message amplification, giveaways, & events – Our census team was pedal to the medal for two straight years, and so this campaign required a never-ending supply of materials.
• College student outreach – The pandemic caused mass confusion for transient folks, for example students who usually live on college campuses but were unexpectedly sent home. So we quickly worked with our campus organizing partners to help get the word out asap before misinformation took hold.
• In-store signage targeting hard-to-reach neighborhoods – In the early days of lockdown, we had to quickly adjust our strategies and tactics for reaching people who might not know about the upcoming census deadlines. So, since one thing people were still venturing out for was food, we put unmissable signs in hyper-targeted niche and ethnic grocery stores across the country.