How we adapted the launch of our civic project, San Jose Census site, in response to COVID-19

Written by Anathea Lolen, Product Manager and Kate Valdes, Product Design Leader.

Image credit: Anathea Lolen

Why the Census?

With schools closed down, potentially until fall, in Santa Clara County, states under stay-at-home orders, and the nation dealing with the early stages of a pandemic, it’s hard to know how long our way of life as Americans will be impacted.

Despite the unknowns, on Tuesday March 17th, citizens of Florida, Illinois, and Arizona headed to the polls to do their civic duty and vote. We are all trying to adapt to the temporary constraints of a socially distant world while still making rent, staying active, and keeping connected with loved ones.

Faced with a mandate to shelter in place, we are forced to assess which of our activities are “essential”. With barren shelves at the grocery store and not a roll of toilet paper in sight, it would be easy to let the 2020 census slip through the cracks.

Yet the census takes place once every decade and has a huge impact on representations and allocation of resources. You can read all about the benefits of participation via national and state level marketing communications. Maybe you already have. We found that the existing messaging did not fully address the needs of our specific community in Santa Clara County. This is where our project started.

Getting Our Project Started

We are Code for San Jose, a volunteer brigade of professionals focused on civic projects that aim to improve our communities through technology. Partnering with Vilcia Rodriguez, project leader at the City of San Jose, we wanted to explore ways to best reach, educate, and encourage our diverse set of community members about how and why it’s important to participate in the census.

City leadership provided community based research about intent and attitudes regarding participation in the 2020 census. Insights indicated that access to technology and fear based concerns were top of mind for traditionally marginalized community groups, specifically for low income families, immigrants, and the home insecure. These groups are the core audience of the SJ Census website, although we hope others find it helpful as well.

With this in mind, we set out to build an informational site that would be displayed at public library kiosks, addressing a set of focused questions and concerns:

• Is my info safe?
• How will my info be used?
• Do I need to take the census, if so how?

The intent was to create a portal, encouraging people who might hesitate or be confused to continue on to the actual U.S. Census site. Our team included many partners from engineers, designers, product managers, city stakeholders, and other community members. Over the course of a year we worked together to deliver a modernly designed and engineering site that would both address the needs of our target audience and fit within city standards.

Unexpected Challenges and How We Overcame Them

Our initial challenges were typical. As a volunteer project we had a high turnover of engineers and designers, each with different ideas about our focus, technology, and visual style. It also created some difficulty making decisions needed to move forward more efficiently. In the city we had a partner with strong opinions but not a lot of time to devote to our project especially as time passed and the census drew near. However we persisted, kept going, and produced a multilingual website answering our key questions as both a dynamic sample survey and a FAQ.

However, our rollout is facing new and unexpected obstacles. The City of San Jose has been understandably distracted by current events. The key expectation was that our website would be available in libraries and community centers as kiosks, complete with trained guides who could help answer questions, and encourage people to take the census. With the closure of public spaces due to COVID-19, we needed to pivot from a design intended to attract attention in a physical space, to one optimized for discovery in a virtual one. We have fine-tuned the mobile version of the site and improved accessibility, in the hopes that we can still be of service to our target audience and possibly a larger one.

Like the rest of the country we are just starting to understand the impact of this pandemic. The goal of this project remains the same, to engage traditionally marginalized community members and support their participation in the census. At this point it feels like a bit of a moving target. With primaries being postponed in some states we’ll have to wait and see what the impact to the census will be. But we suspect that a strong digital ambassador for the 2020 Census will be valuable and help increase compliance at a time when it is more important than ever that we have an accurate count of our community.

Visit our San Jose Census website at https://sjcensus.com/.

If you haven’t already, go Take the Census!

You can check out our open source project on GitHub.

About the Co-authors:

Anathea Lolen is passionate about cities, transportation, and intersectional urbanism. Her interest in how targeted use of technology can help solve everyday problems in her community led her to become a team lead with the Code for San José brigade, working with the City of San José on the Census 2020 information kiosk. She has a 25 year career in technology and is currently working as a product manager in Silicon Valley.

As a Product Design Leader, Kate Valdes is interested in enabling teams to distill complex problems into easy and actionable solutions which help people do more with the time they have. Recently her work has focused on civic and educational non profit organizations.