Last week, we announced that over 200,000 partners have signed on to help us promote the 2010 Census. This is a huge increase over the partner count of the 2000 Census. We’re gratified at the support they bring.

The vast majority of our census partners are community-based organizations such as churches, neighborhood associations and service clubs. These organizations have volunteered to help get the census message out to their constituents. In that way, they validate the census message we spread through paid advertising. Our census partners are trusted voices that have the credibility to spread the census message to their group.

Partners contribute what they can, each in their own way. Some of their ideas are creative, even a little wild. Telemundo weaved a 2010 Census storyline into its most popular telenovela. BET has produced a video PSA with celebrities from the 2009 Hip Hop and 2009 Soul Train awards discussing the importance of the 2010 Census. Carbonfund.org, a national non-profit organization, has agreed to offset the carbon emissions of the 2010 Road Tour. Sesame Workshop has provided the Sesame Street characters, The Count and Rosita, for census events to bring attention to the Census in Schools program.

At the national and local level, many partners send e-mails to their constituents, publish newsletters and post census information on their Web sites. Some translate census promotional materials into different languages, and others provide training space for thousands of census workers.

The Census Bureau helps support the creativity of our partners by making purchases directly from vendors, based on potential rate of return. For example, with partner input, our Seattle region recently paid a local fortune cookie maker to add promotional messages about the 2010 Census to the paper insert. We’ve printed the census logo on paper plates used by mobile taco stands in Los Angeles.

Our goal with efforts like these is to make sure each group gets the message of the census’ importance in a way that fits their lifestyle. We’re spending this money to encourage people to fill out the census form and mail it back. For every 1% of the households that do so, we’ll save about $85 million in taxpayer money.

Please submit any questions pertaining to this post to ask.census.gov.

Director Robert Groves