Case Study: How EarthShot Prize Utilizes YouScan's Social Listening for Planetary Good

How do sustainability and social media intelligence join forces to reshape our approach to social impact and digital analytics? If you don’t have the answer, maybe it is because you do not know the perfect trifecta: The Earthshot Prize, Listen & Learn Research, and YouScan.

But let’s start from the beginning; let us introduce each part of the trifecta. 

A Quick Primer on The Earthshot Prize: The Awaited Game-Changer

The EarthShot Prize is a prestigious initiative aimed at finding solutions for the planet's biggest environmental challenges.

Launched by Prince William in 2020 and inspired by President John F. Kennedy’s “Moonshot” challenge in 1962 to land a man on the moon within a decade, The Earthshot Prize is a high-impact project laser-focused on global environmental improvement.

It revolves around five transformational goals slated for 2030:

• Protect and Restore Nature

• Clean our Air

• Revive our Oceans

• Build a Waste-Free World

• Fix our Climate

Ambitious? Definitely. The challenge then lies in measuring the buzz, support, and conversations surrounding such a grand vision. This is where Listen & Learn Research and YouScan step in.

Introducing the Partners: Listen & Learn Research and YouScan

First up, let's talk about Listen & Learn Research. Based in the UK, they're a professional social intelligence agency that can turn social data into rocket fuel for brand growth, customer acquisition, and market innovation.

YouScan is an AI-powered, next-generation social listening platform. We take pride in our advanced text, image, and audience analysis capabilities that help ventures like The Earthshot Prize navigate the vast landscape of social data while managing brand reputation seamlessly.

Jess Elder, the Head of Digital Marketing at The Earthshot Prize, shed light on how YouScan helps track the impact of the initiative, the buzz around it on social media, and adapt media strategy:

“YouScan allows The Earthshot Prize team to track mentions of the brand online, including social media, news websites, and blogs - as well as helping us to understand the geographical breakdown of media coverage and the volume of articles being published.

It was an essential tool for tracking the reach and engagement online during the announcement of our 2022 finalists and Boston awards.

During the coverage of the awards last year, we were able to use YouScan to see that:

• There were 370,709 mentions on social, resulting in 12.5M engagements

• Conversation was largely driven by the US coverage, national and regional coverage.  

• Key publications included: People, Daily Mail, CNN, ITV, Huff Post and BBC

• Key influencers included: David Beckham, Anni Lennox, Ellie Goulding, Virat Kohli

YouScan also enables us to monitor the sentiment of our content. We were able to track real-time sentiment and adapt our social media strategy accordingly during this peak time, based on public perception.

Another feature we have found useful - is the ability to plug in keywords and tags to monitor the conversation relating to all our finalists.”

Wow, that's a lot of insights! Let’s unpack them a bit.

Multi-Layered Data Insights

With YouScan’s robust media monitoring capabilities, The EarthShot Prize successfully tracked an impressive volume of conversations related to the initiative - hundreds of thousands of mentions and millions of engagements - across both news and social media.

Influencers' voices played a significant role in spreading the message, too! It’s great to see that the ambitious and noble goals of the EarthShot Prize were well-heard and engaged with across the spectrum of media platforms and users.

Real-Time Sentiment Analytics: The Power to Adapt

YouScan’s real-time sentiment analytics allowed The Earthshot Prize to pivot its social strategy in tune with the audience’s perception. Coupled with in-depth human insights from Listen & Learn Research, we’re talking about real-time strategy adaptation. How can you get more agile than that?

Conversational Tracking with Keywords and Tags

Beyond analytics for the well-defined monitoring topics, YouScan offers a comprehensive approach that allows launching new tracking campaigns and modifying existing ones when it is required.

The Earthshot Prize was able to plug in keywords and tags to track conversations related to its finalists, prioritizing quality of analysis over sheer quantity of data.

So there you have it — the collaboration of The Earthshot Prize, Listen & Learn Research, and YouScan is far more than a one-hit wonder. It's an ongoing collaboration that promises to inform strategies and inspire ambitions for a better future using insights from social media data.