About the Company
ORBIT is a not-for-profit spin-out company from the University of Oxford. They are the leading provider of training and expertise in Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and have trained over 6000 researchers in how to anticipate the impact of their work on society and the environment. ORBIT works with researchers at 32 universities in the UK, Africa and India, covering disciplines from autonomous systems, AI, compound semiconductors, quantum computing and regenerative medicine. We spoke to Managing Director Martin De Heaver who shared ORBIT’s journey with NewsCatcher so far.
Identifying the Problem
Our clients are keen to promote their research. They want to identify news events where their research might contribute to the future resolution of significant problems with impacts on a local or global scale. Take someone who’s working on compound semiconductors or someone focused on the research of the next generation of photolithography for transistors.
While these experts excel in very specialized fields, discussing the practical impact of their work can often feel abstract. Meanwhile, university technology transfer managers are eager to commercialize this valuable research. Although the UK excels in developing ideas, it often struggles with commercialization. Therefore, we were exploring ways to identify potential interested parties to fully realize the potential of their research. One strategy under consideration involves engaging with current news events. For example, the geopolitical issues involving TSMC in Taiwan, and the fact that they've got a high percentage of the advanced semiconductor market may be a good indicator that it’s worth highlighting a technology developed outside that region that could potentially redress the balance. So we were seeking a way to automate the process of finding such relevant articles.
Adopting the Solution
Alongside NewsCatcher, my team experimented with Google News, Reuters, Factiva, and newsapi.org. Our assessment criteria were the scope of sources, performance, cost and flexibility. After some testing, we found NewsCatcher to meet these criteria best, as well as being easy to use with great tech support.
Implementation
We identified NewsCatcher as a great source of relevant news articles to meet this client’s need. Using NewsCatcher, we developed an automated service for our clients called PRsona.net. This service builds a persona for each client based on their interests and uses pre-existing content to determine their ‘voice’. PRsona then looks for relevant news articles for each client and presents them for consideration. If they wish to respond to an article PRsona automatically creates a response in the client’s unique ‘voice’ by feeding the articles into custom GPT models to generate posts. These are then posted to Twitter (X) and LinkedIn in the correct format. We found clients love the focus and performance this service gives them Currently, we focus on English content only but are considering multi-lingual content coverage as our audience is global.
Conclusion
Since adopting NewsCatcher, we have seen a 153% increase in impressions/engagement on social media and a significant increase in click-throughs to client websites. NewsCatcher is amazing to support our identification of relevant events enabling efficient, targeted content sharing.