Adapting Field Operations to Meet Unprecedented Challenges English March 01, 2021 By Jennifer Reichert, Assistant Division Chief, Nonresponse, Evaluations, and Experiments, and Dale Kelly, Chief of Field Division SUBSCRIBE Even under ideal circumstances, conducting a census is an enormous undertaking. It involves hundreds of thousands of people and dozens of operations and systems—all with the goal of counting everyone living in the United States once, only once, and in the right place. But as we all know, the year 2020 was certainly not ideal. As we process census responses and analyze the quality of the 2020 Census, it’s helpful to look back at some of the unprecedented challenges we faced during this census, and how we adapted our operations to overcome these challenges and complete the count.