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. And we were – as of, you know, last week, we were at 109 percent of our target for that week. So we – that seems to be going well.
Now we’ve basically – the basic components of the census are – they really fall in four groups. One is to get the – what we call the frame right, and that’s to get the address list right. And we have a number of operations to do that, including the address canvassing I mentioned earlier, but other ones.
We then do a whole series of enumeration operations, some that focus on the housing units, but also some that focus on the group quarters. We have a special group quarters enumeration program, where people will go out to these nursing homes and the college dorms, as so forth, and collect that information.
And then we have support operations for that. For example, we have a telephone questionnaire assistance centers. We have four of those that – commercial call centers that – there’s a number on the form. If you have a question, you can call them and they will answer the question. So we have to have all those kind of support operations.
Obviously, there was a huge printing task to print out what we mailed out. We printed – and the enumerator forms, also, you know, 200 million forms in paper that had to be printed, plus all of the advance letters and the reminder cards and the training manuals and all that. It’s a huge printing activity. We had this – all of these 120 million mail out forms in this one warehouse in Chicago. You know, it’s putting all your eggs in one basket and watching that basket very carefully. And starting about a week before the forms were to go out in the mail, the U.S. Postal Service would start backing trucks up. We had, like, a thousand semis of mail forms going out from that Chicago warehouse all over the country. So it’s a lot of support, obviously, not just the people in the field.
And then we have, if you will, verification and – what we call verification in coverage operations. If there seems to be a discrepancy on the form, and I’ll give – we will 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 ele