All 248 area census offices (ACOs) across the country are open and ready for business, as of December 9. The ACOs are housing the managers, staff, materials, and equipment needed to support the hundreds of thousands of workers who will conduct local census operations, including following up with households that do not respond, counting residents living in group housing, and other enumeration operations.

Partnership efforts at both the national and local level remain on track with 522 participating national organizations and more than 146,000 community and local partners resulting in over 150,000 events for the 2020 Census.

The communications campaign is well under way with multiple milestones having taken place this month. The Census Bureau posted the media buy list to the 2020 Census website on December 9 and launched the Remote Alaska print, out-of-home, and radio media the week of December 16—a full month prior to the first enumeration kickoff in Tooksok Bay. Also of note, the field recruitment paid national campaign began on December 9 and field recruitment banners were shipped to regional locations on December 10.

The Census Bureau continues to take steps to increase applicants for peak operations as we endeavor to meet our interim goals. These steps include boosting the advertising budget, adding over 3,000 Recruiting Assistants to those already on board, mailing millions of postcards, activating our partners to assist with the jobs message, and increasing pay rates in three out of every four of the nation’s counties—especially in areas facing the greatest challenges. Additionally in December, the Census Bureau payed search engines to move census jobs to the top of online search results. We also sent letters to 6,100 colleges and universities―to potentially reach 20 million students―to ask for recruiting help and we coordinated with organizations that hire seasonal workforces, such as the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). We also began adding hundreds of adjudicators to speed up background investigations and the badging process and we expanded the availability of locations to collect enumerator and census field supervisor fingerprints, some of which opened in December. We will continue to open locations through January 2020, and these locations will remain open through the peak selection period.

Finally, the Census Bureau finalized all translated 2020 Census non-English pages for the 2020 Census website on December 31.