Happy belated New Year from the team here at D3! Many of us are looking forward to 2021 with the hope that it will bring a brighter future. In keeping with tradition, we want to reflect on this past year: the challenges it presented, the hurdles we overcame, and the resiliency we discovered as a company.

Like many businesses in the U.S. and around the world, D3 officially transitioned to 100% telework on March 16^th to help mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Fortunately, D3 has a long history of remote work, and our team was already equipped to take on this challenge. However, working only from home changed the metrics defining our year: we traveled over 1 million miles less than we did in 2020, and we connected virtually more, spending over 750,000 minutes together on virtual calls. We also adapted many of our face-to-face projects to telephone, largely thanks to quick developments and upgrades to our Research Control Solutions software that allowed interviewers to be able to work from home. As a result, D3 was able to continue conducting research for our clients, while protecting the safety of our interviewers and respondents.

Despite all the uncertainty this year, D3 still achieved a greater output of work and conducted research in nearly as many countries as we did last year, including four new to D3. Additionally, we were fortunate to expand our team by five exceptional analysts, and we will have new statisticians joining our team in the coming months. All of this would not have been possible without the long-standing relationships we have built with our clients like Sesame Workshop, the Asia Foundation, USAGM, and Northrop Grumman, just to name a few.

We are grateful to all our research partners and clients for working with us during the difficult year that was 2020. Looking forward to more Designing for Data-driven Decisions in 2021!