St. Mary's County Complete Count Committee ramps final outreach ahead of Sept. 30 deadline

St. Mary's County's Census Complete Count Committee met Sept. 17 to review final outreach and advertising as the 2020 Census approached its scheduled close on Sept. 30, county staff said.

The committee heard that the county's self-response rate was hovering just below the committee's 70% goal — 69.7% as of Sept. 14 and 69.8% as of the day before the meeting — and organizers described a weeklong push of radio advertising, mobile questionnaire-assistance sites and neighborhood outreach to raise the final tally.

The committee's media lead, Alyssa Casas, said the county used radio, cable television, internet, newspaper and transit-bus ads paid for through the 2020 Maryland Census Grant Program and that remaining grant-funded outreach would end Sept. 30. "To coincide with the completion of the 2020 Census, all outreach, advertising, and campaign strategies will end on September 30th," Casas said. She also told the committee that a planned movie-theater advertising campaign was canceled because theaters closed during the COVID-19 pandemic and the money was reallocated to radio advertising.

Sandy Green, of the…