 call you. For example, if the first question says, “How many people live here?” And you might fill out three. And then you go on and ask questions about person one, and then you ask questions about person two. And they never filled out the answers for person three. They only filled it out – so we’ll call and find out that extra information. That’s an example of the follow-up operation. Every operation has quality control built in.
And then we have a follow-up operation we call census coverage measurement, which is, if you will, an independent census in a sample of blocks around the country that is then, using statistical techniques, used to assess how good the census is. And there will be reports that come out of that.
To complement the actual operations, we have a communications program. We have – goals are really three: to increase the mail response, as I said how much that saves; to improve the accuracy and reduce the differential undercount. We don’t want one group that is count – we don’t want to miss people differentially from one particular group versus another; and we want them to cooperate with the enumerators. If they don’t send it back, we want them to accept that people are going to come by.
We use paid media to do this. We’re spending roughly $140 million on advertisements. I don’t know if you’re basketball fans. If you see March Madness, you’ll see an ad from Frank, March-to-the-Mailbox. That will be on in the Elite Eight Saturday night and Sunday night. You’ll see that ad. We were at the Super Bowl. We also get – we’re sponsoring a driver in NASCAR, in the stock car racing. So he’s got the U.S. Census on his hood, on his rear bumper, that sort of thing. We hope he does well so he’s featured more, but can’t guarantee that.
We also have a partnership program, which we send – we’ve hired roughly 3,000 people across the country to work with others to help us do the census better. For example, I’ll just give you an example at the national level. We had somebody contact Best Buy, which is a consumer electronics store, and they have these – this huge wall of TV’s. Well, they’re going to be playing a Census ad. Instead of a Disney movie, they’ll be having a Census ad on. Target, a big retailer, they’ll have a Sunday – they put these Sunday inserts in the papers. They’ll devote one of the pages of their Sunday insert to the Census ad. And that is donated. That is – we don’t pay for that; they donate that. And we go down to local levels. We encourage these localities to form complete count committees where they get members from business, from the nonprofit sector, so forth, to work together to encourage counts in their communities. And they work throughout the Census. And their real target is to try to reach the hard to count and encourage them to participate.
We also have – they also provide locations for what we call questionnaire assistance centers. If you need help with your form, we’ve got 30,000 of those across the country, where you can go and get help.
This – one final note. I mention this is a short form, 10 questions, 10 minutes. What about all those other topics we used to collect information on? We had a long form also as part of the 2000 Census that had, I think, it was 59 questions. We made a design change in this past decade. We now do something called the American Community Survey, that we ask – it replaces the long form, basically. It’s for – it’s a very large household survey of about 250,000 households per month, which is almost three million over a year. We produce statistics every year from that survey to very low geographic levels. So we now basically do a monthly survey to replace the once every 10 years long form. And that seems to work very well. People are very cooperative, and we release data every year from that survey.
So that’s the overview. Think – I’ll be happy to take questions, try to give you a little more insight into some of the details if you’re interested. So feel free to ask questions.
You had your hand up first, so there’ll be plenty of time. Go ahead. QUESTION:
Okay. Nichol