Find one or more publicly-available, non-trivial1 data sets of interest to you. Identify a real-to-life organization whose future decision on some matter may be informed by your planned analysis of those data. The organization may be any specific for-profit, non-profit, or government. You may not choose our class examples or examples from another class as a topic.
Compose a short, 250 words maximum2 memo written to the chief analytics officer at your chosen organization.
Use this memo to request that you draft a proposal of — and later perform — a new analysis on the identified data in which you expect it will inform the organization’s decision.
A new analysis is one in which you would — if your memo persuades the analytics executive to approve your plan to write a proposal and conduct an analysis — explore, visualize, and optionally model the identified data to uncover patterns relating to or informing the organization’s decision or opportunity. An analysis is not merely reporting someone else’s analysis or summary of that data.
You are writing from the role of either a consultant to that organization, or as one of its employees. To understand your audience, review Zetlin (2017), and conduct online research (google searches, linkedin, etcetera).
Your memo will be assessed on the following:
Focused, concise language using techniques from class discussions.
Organization of the memo, using the concepts from class discussions and readings (e.g., Doumont, Storr, Sharot, Zinsser, Booth).
Appropriate for an analytics executive. Consider the (likely) goals and background of your executive.
Effectively persuades your audience of your project’s feasibility, value, and to approve of writing a full proposal for analysis.
Appropriately identifies / cites your data and other sources.
Submit your memo onto courseworks as an html or pdf file and named lastname-firstname-hw3.html or lastname-firstname-hw3.pdf, accordingly.
Of note: Your memo contributes to a future group project in that the group of which you become a member3 will assess each member’s memo and select one of them to write an expanded proposal and implement the project this semester.
At the very minimum, the data set(s) should include multiple quantitative and qualitative variables of observed measures, but more variables and observations generally lead to more interesting analyses.↩︎
For reference, about 383 words lay in these instructions.↩︎
I’ll randomly assign you to a group after the memos are submitted.↩︎
If you see mistakes or want to suggest changes, please create an issue on the source repository.