Boston-based InCrowd offers real-time physician market research. In 2016, they conducted two surveys of emergency room and primary care doctors on the topic of burnout. More than 500 responded to the multiple choice and essay-style questions. The latter yielded a wide range of replies, many of them deeply emotional, and InCrowd asked me to craft a narrative to accompany the charts and graphs.

I started by reading through the Excel spreadsheets containing all responses, weeding out the least useful, one- and two-word replies. I then read through the remaining replies several times, organizing them according to recurring themes (such as frustration with insurance companies and time-consuming electronic records systems, and pressure from health systems to see more and more patients per day). These themes provided a basic structure for the report, which InCrowd turned into a 15-page downloadable white paper that both explained the findings and demonstrated the company’s capabilities.

What powerful stories are lurking in the data you possess or can access?