A Campaign To Get Los Angeles Counted
Fenton worked with the California Community Foundation to create We Count LA, a multilingual, multicultural campaign run in concert with a coalition of 115+ community organizations.
WeCount LA
A Campaign To Get Los Angeles Counted
The Challenge
Once every 10 years, L.A. County has an opportunity to secure its fair share of federal resources and Congressional representation through the U.S. Census. After losing millions of dollars following a severe undercount in 2010, the County set a goal to count every resident in the 2020 Census. To accomplish this, the County needed to find a way to clearly communicate the value of the census and information about how to participate to all its residents, which include the largest hard-to-count population in the country. On top of this challenge, the 2020 Census officially kicked off right as the COVID-19 pandemic hit, making in-person engagement impossible. Fenton partnered with L.A. County to develop a strategic communications approach to 1) provide County Departments and partner cities with the information and tools to successfully engage their residents digitally; 2) promote safe census participation from home and facilitate participation via paid advertising, social media and video content; and 3) conduct extensive media outreach to garner news coverage among mainstream and ethnic media outlets to build greater visibility among hard-to-count communities.
Our Approach
Fenton developed a multi-pronged campaign plan that positioned L.A. County to be fully resourced to support public education of the census countywide, aligned with other concurrent census education and outreach opportunities, and prioritized engaging the County’s hard-to-count residents. We built a digital toolkit providing a suite of customizable public education materials including fact sheets, social media copy and graphics, and website content in the County’s 12 threshold languages to enable County partners to immediately share core information about the census with local residents. In addition to ongoing social media content, Fenton created a suite of paid digital ads targeting households in hard-to-count census tracts and informational videos focused on key topics such as counting youth, confidentiality and the importance of a full count.
Success
By shifting to focus our campaign on paid digital ads, we were able to bring critical census information to L.A. County residents in the middle of a pandemic, without them having to leave the safety of their homes. The paid media campaign’s initial launch in April garnered more than 9 million impressions, reaching an estimated 140,000 to 285,000 LA County residents in hard-to-count communities. In addition to paid ads, Fenton has written over 100 census-related social media posts for partner cities and County departments to customize as needed and share with their audiences on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. In June, we co-led a webinar with the County to train more than 50 city and county representatives to utilize digital tools to communicate effectively about the census online. Looking ahead to the extended census deadline on October 31, Fenton will continue to implement paid digital ads, as well as provide social media content, share graphics and other materials in multiple languages to enable partner cities and county departments to continue sharing relevant, up-to-date information about the census online.