Aurora

We spent 2009/10 developing Aurora for our members, and the tool is robust and adding value to Directors of Communications in terms of assessing the impact of their own media coverage, and comparing it with their peer world class universities.

Quantitative Assessment
We start by looking quantitatively at all the world 100 universities, to give a snapshot of total international online media coverage in the given week, each month. Domestic coverage is excluded to ensure size of host country doesn't skew findings and this allows us to focus on the international dimension, which is critical for world class universities.

Qualitative Assessment
We then look at the coverage qualitatively and have developed a scoring system that allows us to weight the impact of the articles and benchmark the universities against one another. Each article is read by two independant scorers and moderated by a third professonal. We create an impact score by assessing various prominence factors e.g. number of words, position on website, whether the university is in the headline, weight of journalist, number of university mentions, named researchers mentioned, illustrations, web links, etc. This delivers an editorial impact score which is then weighted by three factors: tone, reach and institutional amplification - from which we derive each university's final impact score.

Customised reports will be delivered monthly and include both quantitative and qualitative findings and analysis to highlight the nature of the coverage (e.g. research-related), its tone (positive, negative, passive) etc. The full methodology for this mapping is available on request.