Sydney Atheists and the Atheist Foundation of Australia combined to run a 'Census No Religion' campaign, encouraging people who are no longer religious to mark 'No Religion' in the census. The campaign was strongly opposed by various religious groups. The results of the campaign are detailed below:
Census No Religion 2026
Campaign Results Summary
Reporting period: 1 Jan 2026 – 12 Aug 2026 (Census night: 11 Aug 2026)
Executive Summary
The Census No Religion 2026 campaign ran across Meta, YouTube and TikTok in the lead-up to census night, delivering approximately 22 million impressions and views, and reaching more than 1.9 million unique people on Meta alone. Engagement was strong across all three platforms, and audience response to several key creative concepts was excellent, giving clear, evidence-based direction for any future campaign of this kind.
Reach & Delivery Across Platforms
|
Platform |
Metric |
Result |
|
Meta |
Impressions |
9,928,304 |
|
Meta |
Unique people reached |
1,924,161 |
|
TikTok |
Impressions |
6,296,816 |
|
YouTube |
Views |
5,844,554 |
|
YouTube |
Engaged views |
2,721,179 |
|
All platforms |
Total impressions/views |
22,069,674 |
These totals reflect gross exposure across platforms rather than unique individuals, with the exception of Meta's own reach figure, which does measure unique people.
Platform Highlights
Meta (Facebook & Instagram)
Meta delivered close to 10 million impressions and reached over 1.9 million unique Australians. Click-through rate across all Meta advertising averaged 1.08% — a solid result for an issue-advocacy campaign — with the best individual creative reaching a 7.6% click-through rate, several times above the campaign average.
YouTube
YouTube was a standout for audience attention: viewers watched an average of 97.7% of each video, an unusually high completion rate that reflects both strong creative and well-matched short-form ad lengths. The three biggest-reaching videos, all released in the final fortnight before census night, together drew more than 3.1 million views:
● "'No religion' is already the single largest answer — over 11 million Australians" — 1,222,265 views
● "Answer for who you are today" — 961,248 views
● "Australia's census should reflect what we really believe" — 933,867 views
TikTok
TikTok delivered 6.3 million impressions, contributing close to a third of the campaign's total exposure and extending the campaign's reach into a younger audience segment not as strongly represented on Meta or YouTube.
What Resonated Most
Looking across all creative concepts tested on Meta, one message stood out clearly: "Answer for who you are" achieved by far the highest engagement of any creative in the campaign, with a click-through rate roughly three times the campaign average. Positive, identity-affirming messaging ("answer for who you are," "census should reflect what we believe") consistently outperformed messaging built around statistics or AI-generated visuals, which is a valuable signal for how to frame future civic-advocacy creative.
The two broadest-reach creatives — built around the idea that religious leaders don't represent the audience's actual values — carried the largest share of impressions and played an important role in building overall awareness, even though they engaged at a lower rate than the top-performing concept.
Overall Appraisal
This was a well-executed, high-reach awareness campaign. It reached a large, relevant cross-section of the Australian public in the weeks before census night, sustained strong attention on video content (reflected in YouTube's near-total average completion rate), and identified a clear creative winner in "Answer for who you are" that can anchor messaging in future campaigns. Combined, Meta, YouTube and TikTok gave the campaign genuine multi-platform coverage, reaching different audience segments through each channel's particular strengths.
To see our Youtube videos, go to: https://www.youtube.com/@censusnoreligion/videos
