I've been given the following which shows new membership sign-ups per campaign:
Average: 291
25% Percentile: 219
50% Percentile: 283
75% Percentile: 347
And need to calculate the percentage for a given value.
I Googled for a solution but from what I see, it seems as though I need the full range of data to calculate percentage for a value.
Is it possible to do with just these three percentiles? For example, if a campaign were to have 300 new membership sign-ups, can I calculate percentage?
It largely depends on what specific distribution the data follows, but you might be able to get some sort of idea if you make assumptions such as that it might be normally distributed (wiki - normal distribution). This is often a reasonable assumption as many naturally occurring sets of data are normally distributed (iq, height, size of trees, number of leaves on trees, etc...).
If it so happens that it is normally distributed, (which looks reasonable), then we can center our focus on the average calculated: 291.
From there, we want to guess as to what the standard deviation might be. If it is in fact normally distributed, the $25^{th}$ percentile mark should be at about the same distance away from the average as the $75^{th}$ percentile mark at about $0.6745$ times the standard deviation away from the average.
With that, we guess then $291-219 = 72\approx 0.6745\sigma$ and $347-291=56\approx 0.6745\sigma$. Well... they aren't quite the same distance apart, so that implies that if it were normally distributed that there would be some outliers messing up the average.
Let us guess instead that the average should naturally have been closer to the $50^{th}$ percentile mark at 283. $283-219 = 64\approx 0.6745\sigma$ and $347-283=64 \approx 0.6745\sigma$. These we find are perfectly evenly spaced, which helps support our hypothesis that it were normally distributed. Calculating for $\sigma$ then gives us $\sigma = 64/0.6745\approx 95$.
We suppose then that our data is normally distributed with average 283 and standard deviation 95. Using a conversion to work with the standard normal distribution (where average was 0 and standard deviation is 1), by setting $z = \frac{283 - x}{95}$ we can then use a chart of values to find out in what percentile a specific value of $x$ is.
This gives way to the following chart:
$\begin{array}{l|l} 10^{th}\text{percentile} & 161\\ 20^{th}\text{percentile} & 203\\ 30^{th}\text{percentile} & 233\\ 40^{th}\text{percentile} & 259\\ 50^{th}\text{percentile} & 283\\ 60^{th}\text{percentile} & 307\\ 70^{th}\text{percentile} & 333\\ 80^{th}\text{percentile} & 363\\ 90^{th}\text{percentile} & 404\\ 99^{th}\text{percentile} & 504 \end{array}$
This will not be entirely accurate for a few reasons. First: we already know that the average was calculated and was in fact different than the $50^{th}$ percentile marker (which if it was normally distributed should not have happened). Second, it is possible that the data is not well approximated by a normal distribution. Still, without more information, the assumptions made seem reasonable.