The US government has gone digital with the constitutionally mandated decennial population survey. Over its 230-year history, the US agency in charge of data collection has relied on surveyors to gather population data. Until now.
The pandemic impacted the way people communicate and made the world more dependent upon digital solutions than ever before. Although the agency already had a digital roadmap planned, this challenging time made their modernization efforts even more critical. While technologies like cloud computing and mobile devices made it easy to go digital, they also posed additional challenges. These roadblocks, such as availability, access and security, needed to be addressed. The agency proactively leveraged available technology to make participation easier for all Americans, while providing the US government more efficient access to the resulting data. With a response rate of 99.98%, the joint effort between the agency, Akamai and RavenTek resulted in the successful roll-out of the inaugural 2020 online survey. This use case explores all the challenges faced by the agency and how our solutions helped them overcome them.