Census 2020 AAPI Outreach
September 2020
Back in 2019, I started planning the third season of my podcast, Chatting with Asians, with the goal to discuss different forms of activism. With the upcoming 2020 presidential election and knowing that Asian Americans have been the least politically engaged ethnic group in history, I wanted to bring more awareness to political issues that affect the AAPI community. The 2020 Census was especially different from other decades because people’s lives were changing so suddenly at the beginning of the pandemic. With the deadline for self-reporting extended, I thought it was important to highlight why participating in the Census benefits the community while there was still time for others to self-report.
Type: Instagram carousel post
Tools: Canva
The Process
Collecting the data
Sometimes, I like to sketch out visualizations using the ol’ pencil and paper pad. Other times, especially if I’m creating IG posts, it’s easier for me to kind of rapid prototype using Canva throughout the creative process. As I was researching on how Census participation affected federal funding for communities, I was also typing out notable information onto draft posts. I would also start moving around the information to get a sense of how the story would flow as people scrolled through the posts. Eventually, I would have a skeleton of the content for the project.
Designing in Canva
Since I wanted the designs to be eye-catching so that people would be compelled to read the posts and take the Census participation seriously, I was inspired by other social impact ads. I took a look through the Ad Council’s work and noticed that ads with more serious tones and a sense of urgency in their messaging also showed more bold texts and more sharply contrasting colors. I applied the same approach to this series of posts, which helped guide my thinking around creating templates for certain kinds of content.
What I Learned
This project helped me to understand the hierarchy of data and how that influenced my design process. In my mind, there were two main categories of content within this series: bold statements and informative posts.
Bold statements would be the main takeaways that I would want people to see if they were to skim through these posts… let’s face it, our attention span is getting shorter and shorter. So the design for the bold statements had to be concise, simple, yet striking - no more than three sentences in one bold statement post.
Informative posts, on the other hand, had much more information to cover that I felt were too important to exclude from the series. This is where the sizing and bolding of texts became very influential in how people would skim and read the information. For the informative posts about why the Census was important, I highlighted the areas of funding that would impact people the most (education, health, and voting) and then added bullet points for examples of AAPI groups that would be at a further disadvantage if funding were to decrease. For the informative posts about how to fill out the Census and additional language resources, I bolded CTAs (visiting websites or calling phone numbers) and I also bolded languages so that people’s eyes could quickly scan and find the language they needed.
When I took a look at my IG insights after posting this, I learned that:
It had reached 966 accounts (63% who weren’t following me)
It was saved 17 times
And it was shared via DM 95 times!
It had the most impressions from the hashtags that I used. I’m guessing that because Millennials and Gen-Z’s were having a surge of interest in activism after the initial BLM protests during the summer, using the most relevant hashtags like #racismisavirus and #weallcount helped a lot in bringing more eyeballs to this series. All in all, this was one of the most motivating projects and I’m glad that this series saw good results!