Hey, Sam! You said for your job you “synthesize data into manageable chunks.” I teach college composition, and one of the curriculum’s assigned units is the synthesis paper. Since my own professional experience is limited to teaching, I was wondering if you could give me an example of what your end goal of synthesis would be, so I can give my students an example of the skill’s worth besides “this is one component of your research/argument paper in the next unit.” Thanks!
Sure. So, a little context – I work in a research office, and our clients are mainly fundraisers who are asking their donors for LARGE donations – generally $100K at minimum, and up to hundreds of millions of dollars. So the stakes are relatively high.
A great example for your students is the “one pager” we do. One of our main fundraisers attends a lot of galas and events, and he needs to know who will be there and how to interact. So he’ll send us a list of, say, 20 names. Our team will prepare a one-page biography on each person, which includes:
– Name of donor and anyone attending with them, how they’re related to our organization, and their photo
– Full but brief work biography including college degrees
– Spouse or co-attendee’s brief work biography, if any
– Children, if any
– Their previous giving to our organization
– Their giving to other organizations
– Their last meeting, if any, with the fundraiser who will be reading the bio
This is all stuff that takes maybe an hour to assemble per person, but finding some of it takes some fairly specialized skills, and it’s also an hour that the fundraiser doesn’t have to spend on it if we do it. Additionally it means they ONLY get the information they need – no extraneous facts sloshing around in their heads. The document serves as a record of the person’s current situation, so if in the future they try to remove a portion of their work or giving history from the internet, we still have that information in the document (and in our database, where the info is usually entered once the document is finished).
Another different less literary example is what we call “prospecting” – using a database of thousands of constituents to find new prospective donors. We are trained to take a list of between say, fifty and five hundred names, “pull” their info (giving to us, giving potential, interests, location, position and place of work, last time they spoke to us, etc) and pick out the best perhaps twenty names; we might do a little additional research to make our case, then present those names to the fundraiser who asked for them, who then goes out and asks them for money; what we’ve done is heavily increase the odds they’ll ask the richest people with the most interest in our org, giving them a better chance of landing a major donation.
Both the one pager and prospecting are different forms of information synthesis we perform, but the business applications are obvious – this synthesis is how you break down vital information to offer to your clients, employers, and colleagues. It’s the most concise way of reporting information, but also the most convincing, because you go straight to the heart of what they need to know.
Clarity in writing is so important for our job that I have literally been told in job interviews “We asked you to this interview because your cover letter was so much better than anyone else’s we saw”. I literally landed an interview on the strength of my business writing; they didn’t care that my degrees are in theatre or I started with the org I’m in as a receptionist. That’s how important it is to be clear and convey information well in prose.
I hope that helps – I think good information synthesis is the root of good communication, getting both what you know and what you need across as clearly as possible.
Feel free to use this post for your teaching or hit me up with other questions you may have!
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