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1. Project Planning and Management2. Geospatial Mapping and EA Database3. Enumeration Instruments and Tools4. Data Capture and Management5. Census Testing and Pilots6. Recruitment and Training7. Deployment and Supervision8. Enumeration and Logistics9. Quality Assurance and Risk Management10. Census Analysis and Products11. Partnerships and Collaboration12. Advocacy and Publicity13. Procurement and Financial Management14. Post-Enumeration Survey15. Alternative Approaches16. Planning Checklist
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1. Project Planning and Management2. Geospatial Mapping3. Enumeration Instruments4. Data Capture5. Census Testing6. Recruitment and Training7. Deployment and Supervision8. Enumeration and Logistics9. Quality Assurance10. Census Analysis11. Partnerships12. Advocacy13. Procurement14. Post-Enumeration Survey15. Alternative Approaches16. Planning Checklist
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12. Advocacy, Publicity and Resource Mobilization

Recommendations​

  • A comprehensive publicity and advocacy plan should be put in place to target all population groups, especially the rural or urban residents, residents of formal or informal housing, participants in the formal or informal economy, fully literate, semi-literate, and illiterate groups, speakers of minority languages, recent internal or international migrants, remotely situated or nomadic populations. In addition, special messages should be tailored for the resistant communities. It is important to understand the local situation, and what works for them in any other contact you have with them.

  • Publicity for the census should commence from the onset of the census process including during cartographic mapping, and pre-enumeration listing to the end.  This will help build the confidence of the public over time and mitigate issues such as fake advertisements. During the census preparatory phase, the implementing agencies need to undertake a wide publicity and advocacy campaign to inform the public of the census and to explain its purpose and hence mobilise support and participation.

  • Each census phase should have a subsection on communication and publicity clearly outlining the linkages and requirements to be incorporated in the budget estimates. This helps to fully budget for communication in each phase and avoid omissions.

  • It is important to have a fully dedicated census communication and publicity expert within the NSO right at the start of the planning process to avoid realizing the need during implementation, as was the case in Zimbabwe.

  • The engagement of a communications firm to lead the process of publicity and advocacy plays a major role in getting the public and leaders to support the census. It is more impactful if the firm is brought on board early. A media firm should carry out road shows rather than the NSO as a good strategy for publicity. Outsourcing or collaborating with the private sector could be considered as another potential cost-saving option, particularly in the context of publicity and advocacy.

  • It is important to train all people that will be involved in the publicity campaigns to ensure uniformity and consistency. The media engagement training should be extended to more key personnel, especially the CSOs to ensure they pass the correct message on to the public.

For resource mobilisation in a digital census;

  • Strong advocacy and resource mobilisation efforts to secure multi-year funding commitments from governments and partners is required in a digital census given that budgets in a digital must be front-loaded to accommodate the high initial cost of technology procurement.

  • There should be strong political will built for the census to handle cases of shortage of funds or any other unexpected challenges for instance in Sierra Leone when the funder withdrew, the government came in to cover the funding gap.

It is necessary for the census implementing agencies to:

  • Solicit feedback from users through sharing questionnaires, use of documented strengths and weaknesses of the dissemination products and modalities to improve the dissemination plan.

  • Ensure that the messages based on the census results are newsworthy to the audience. They should state the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the data presented using graphs, charts, quotes from experts, etc.

  • Embrace development of posters that are eye-catching, using visual means of communication such as infographics to display key facts; brochures and flyers are useful for promoting upcoming dissemination events; instructional materials e.g. kits for use in schools to encourage interest in census data; offering and promoting online access to products and services ‘on demand’.

  • Build capacity for use of census products - potential users are not always aware of the benefits of the use of the census for informed, evidence-based decision-making. Users may be willing to use the information but require additional training to more fully understand the data (identify users’ training needs early and ensure adequate funds are available. Request users or donors to provide funding for specific courses, where necessary. Fully integrate training into the census process so that users are involved and interested in the census throughout. Identify and utilise partnerships on different topics e.g. gender, provide learning-at-a-distance opportunities (for example, e-learning).

  • Provide data user support through regular user-producer meetings, and user surveys, post-census press releases and meetings with the media.

  • Embracing data visualisation helps to give a fast overview or summary of a dataset and creates impact and understanding of the main messages. NSOs should strive to communicate memorable or important stories in a dataset(s) to reveal insights that would otherwise be hidden.

  • Strategise and apply innovative modern technology to improve the quantity, frequency, disaggregation, and availability of relevant statistics. This responds to the global Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) framework that calls for a “data revolution”, which fully integrates statistics into decision-making processes and promotes open access to and use of data.

  • Embrace measurement of success to help them check whether they produced the right thing, whether they have reached everyone they thought they would, to justify continuing developing new products, and identifying improvements for the next product (if regular) or requirements for new products.

  • Topics for dissemination depend on census content. Census topics should meet the requirements of users, considering cost-effectiveness, human resources, time availability and respondent burden. After census enumeration, priority should be given to development and dissemination of the census products. Implementing agencies should ensure dissemination of the right data, to the right people, at the right time, and in the right format taking into consideration that census data is a public good.

  • There is a need to undertake measurement of success after dissemination of census products. NSOs and other agencies are encouraged to measure the impact and use of their census data through Google Analytics to monitor visits to the website, and heatmaps (via Hotjar) to see how much people are reading on a page, monitoring social media and news coverage of the disseminated statistics, sends out surveys with newsletters added to the websites etc.

  • NSOs need to return to the people they reached out to before and find out what people are telling them about the latest releases, what questions they are now asking, make a record of this and see how it changes over time.

  • NSOs should conduct a stakeholder/user satisfaction survey such measurements help to check whether you produced the right product, whether you reached everyone you thought you would, justify continued development of new products, and working out the next steps.

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