Microsoft is one of the world’s largest commercial enterprises and it specializes in information. But even for such a large organization, it can be difficult to accurately find and deliver information to the public in a compelling way. By The Numbers was an enormously successful, highly visible project that reflected rapid reaction, research, understanding of information, presentation of that information and social media amplification of the information in a highly successful way. We will look at how it came about and how research and information curation played a big role in the project.