We automated a media monitoring application for a global charity, delivering real-time insight and allowing the team to spend more time on qualitative analysis.
Customer

A leading global charity.


Problem

The charity issues many press releases as part of its strategy to inform the world about its work and raise its profile – up to five press releases a day. It monitors the impact of these releases to compile statistics, such as the number of headline mentions, hits per story and articles mentioning the charity by name.

Previously, the charity used a media monitoring service to carry out web searches and to collate the results on a spreadsheet. This process was inefficient: it relied on manual inputting, so was laborious and slow. There was also a six-week time lag, which meant the charity could not respond immediately to real-time data and adjust the content of its press releases as needed.


Solution

Faculty solved the problem by building an automatic media monitoring application. First, we collected new articles referencing the charity on a virtual machine hosted on a cloud platform. Second, we gathered press releases from the client’s RSS feed. Third, we wrote an algorithm to match the news articles directly with press releases. The app was able to cover many languages by interfacing with a cloud platform translator.

Using Power BI (a reporting tool already used by the client for internal reports) we were able to give a high-level summary of the charity’s media coverage, up to the day before. We also created visualisations, statistics and data, filtered by news outlet, country, language and press release to provide far more accurate information about media coverage.

Finally, we automated the process of populating the media coverage spreadsheet.


Impact

The app has delivered several benefits. It delivers real-time insight into the charity’s media impact and integrates seamlessly with the charity’s existing IT infrastructure. By automating the process of monitoring media coverage, it also allows the media team to spend more time on qualitative analysis.