Fill out city census online, save Calgary $1
If Calgarians want to do their little bit to save city hall expenses, spending about a minute on the census website should be fairly easy.
The city shells out roughly $1 for every full questionnaire their doorto-door census takers collect, census leader Paul Denys said Friday. So each survey completed online means one loonie off the typical $700,000 cost for administering the yearly head count.
That isn’t part of the sales pitch for Calgary’s first online census — It’s simple! Convenient! Secure and private! — but the city is hoping to reap the sort of cost savings that several other Alberta municipalities have reaped by offering an Internet option.
The city’s soft target is that 40 per cent of households fill out the form online. That would beat Edmonton’s first attempt last year, which had 28 per cent uptake, as well as Airdrie’s pioneering launch in 2005 that only had five-per-cent involvement but it’s been around half in later years.
But without being sure how popular the website will be, Denys’ office has hired the usual level of door-to-door temps — 810 this year.
“The difference will be that they will have proportionately less households to visit in their district, depending what the uptake is in each district,” he said.
“The more households that respond to the census online, it will reduce the workload and also will reduce the amount of money we pay out in that manner.”
The in-person staff will follow up in May with any households that don’t use the census website between April 1 and April 24.
The city’s annual population count typically gets filled out by about 98 per cent of all households in Calgary, and is used to calculate per-person provincial grants.
Mayor Naheed Nenshi demonstrated the online census in front of media Friday, filling out a sample form with a full address, number of people in household, number of children and their birth years, school board affiliation and tenancy status ( homeowner or renter).
It took him about 90 seconds, including quips to reporters.