Yesterday was Census Day. Or what used to be Census Day. The furore around the census, and the inability for people to accentually complete the census is massively damaging to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and what it's trying to achieve.
By all accounts the execution of the first attempt to take the Census digital has been a disaster. It's now emerging that the ABS was hacked by an overseas cyber threat which saw the site shut down at around 7pm, but even before that there were a few bungles.
The Census is an important tent pole for the government and for the nation. The responses help shape resources, infrastructure and services that will be provided for future generations by giving the government an accurate picture of the people that make up the populace.
The hashtag #CensusFail was trending globally and countless memes have popped up. The ASB's reputation and people’s willingness to take part in the Census will be shaken a a result. That effects the country down the track if it doesn’t have an accurate picture of the population. It's not exactly going to instil confidence in the government's ability to 'go digital' and modernise. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbulll's so called 'Innovation Agenda' to build the economy of innovation and technology is looking more and more like a pipedream.
It updated the mechanic to go digital, a necessary and progressive move, but it fell down on how it communicated that and how it executed it. Whereas in years gone by Australians had one day to complete the census form, because it was a paper form and it was designed to offer a snapshot of the populace on that day.
In the shift to digital, people now have until 23 September to fill out the Census – that's three weeks. By communicating around 'Census Day' and giving the impression that everyone had to hop online at once to log in and fill it out, the ABS scored an own goal. A better might have been 'Census Week' or 'Census Month'.
Questions around data privacy have been handled badly many were left confused and hacked off because the ABS wasn't staffed up to respond to the volume of enquiries it was getting.
There's also been outcry over the ABS' decision to keep names for four years, rather than 18-months as in previous years. The irony of this is amusing at the very least when you consider how happily people will hand over their data to organisations such as Facebook or Google or iTunes without a thought on what it will be used for or which other organisations will be able to access it, but it wasn't dealt with well.
The ASB has been inundated with people trying to get in touch. Its call centres couldn’t handle the volume and it was overwhelmed with an unexpected number of enquires about the digital shift. A wholesale shift that affects the entire population is bound to see an influx - so not having enough staff to handle it is a basic error. Its Twitter feed seemed to just spit out generic responses too, rather than addressing individuals. It would have been wiser to overcompensate in case of a crisis, rather than be hit by one and unable to deal with it.
People are not very forgiving of this kind of thing. Particularly when it's coming from government. The fundamentals of advertising mean that brands, businesses, and the government have to be able to deliver on what is promised in ads and brand communication.
Just last week the Gruen panellists discussed Telstra's latest brand campaign and proffered that unless Telstra can back up its claims of “magical connections”, it has to have its network and services operating flawlessly. Telstra has had some backlash from disgruntled customers asking for less magic, and more people manning the phones in the call centre to handle.
The ABS and government will have to work extra hard to bring people back on side to complete the census, and to restore confidence and trust in their ability to execute in digital.
