ctronics 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. Nicholai Zimin, Itogi, Russia. It’s my first American Census, but I’ve never known that you start so early the preparation work. MR. WEINBERG:
So could you please give us the sense, what are you doing so early?MR. WEINBERG:
On the planning. MR. WEINBERG:
Yes. Well, for example, we’re not using the internet at all for this census in terms of collecting data. We are using it in terms of publicity, but not for collecting data. We know that in 10 years, the internet will be an even bigger part of people’s lives than it is now, so we are planning tests of how to use the internet to collect data for the census.
Another example is automation. We attempted to automate most of the field operations for this census, and we weren’t successful. We did automate our – what I called our address canvassing. That was the updating of the address frame, using hand-held computers. But we weren’t successful in using that for non-response follow-up. And we know that we need to – since we weren’t successful, we know we need to continue to work in that area.
And the cost growth of the Census has been pretty substantial. And we want to look at as many methods as possible that will keep the costs down. For example, instead of sending out 140,000 people into 2019, and that cost – in 2009, that cost about $450 million, that one operation. Let’s see if we can spread that work over the decade, keep the address list continually updated, and only targeted areas would get that sort of last-minute – high-growth areas would get that last minute updating in 2019 if we keep the address list current. And in that one, we’ve proposed to the Congress – it’s in the President’s proposed fiscal 2011 budget that we be allowed to do that continual updating. And we’ll see if the Congress approves for our – when they consider our budget later this year.
So it’s that sort of thing we’re looking at. It’s clearly a fairly low level, but there are research questions that can contribute to this cost saving in 2020 that we need to start now.
Sure. Go ahead. QUESTION:
My na