Is Census Letter a Waste of Money?

Is Census Letter Wasteful Spending Or Good Marketing?
Census Letter Sent To 120 Million Americans

Posted: 7:41 pm CST March 9, 2010/Channel3000.com  

MADISON, Wis. -- Many people have received a letter from the U.S. Census to remind them that the actual census is coming soon.

Many people felt it was a waste of taxpayer money, so WISC-TV looked into whether it was wasteful spending or smart marketing.

The letter sent to 120 million Americans gave them notice that another letter was coming. It sent the online community buzzing, with many commenting about how it's useless, wasteful and not a smart use of taxpayer dollars.

But experts in the field of marketing and direct mail said the U.S. Census is using a legitimate strategy of spending a little bit of money up front to save a lot of money on the back end.

"Essentially, for every 1 percentage point that the response rate can go up because of this letter, it will save about $85 million in back-end costs of having someone visit households, follow up manually, by phone, and then the visit. So essentially, this is pretty cost-effective," said Turina Bakken, dean of business and applied arts at Madison Area Technical College.

Bakken, who has studied direct mail and marketing campaigns, said while on the surface she understands why some are questioning this, she believes it's a good way to get through the clutter in people's mailboxes to get them to pay attention to a very important government survey.

The U.S. Census actually started this notification letter approach in the 2000 census, and officials estimated it was so successful that this one pre-census letter was responsible for a 6 percent increase in responses, or about 2 million households.

Because of that, officials said less money was spent on census workers having to go door-to-door to collect the information manually.

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