Dell Technologies
Client
Dell Technologies’ mission is to deliver technology solutions that drive human progress. It helps organisations and people build their digital future and transform how they work, live, and play.
Since 2020, that mission has included working with Citizens of the Reef (formerly Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef) to provide technology support for its citizen science project the Great Reef Census. The project invited reef visitors to photograph individual reefs for analysis by other volunteers to understand the health and scope of life on the reef.
SBM worked with Dell Technologies on public relations campaigns for each phase of the program highlighting and explaining the increasingly complex technical solutions underpinning the census.
Project Details
Spreading the word on how technology supports better insights
Citizens of the Reef is a conservation organisation dedicated to protecting the world’s reefs through peoplepower, AI, and science. It makes it possible for anyone to contribute to the protection and preservation of reefs globally. Their key initiative, Great Reef Census, recruits citizen scientists to collect data on the Great Barrier Reef by sharing photographs of the reef.
The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest coral reef ecosystem and threats, such as bleaching and a dense population of coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish, have damaged large sections of the delicate ecosystem. Previously, researchers could only regularly monitor around 5-10% of the 3,000 individual reefs, making informed decisions difficult.
TECHNOLOGY STORIES
There were multiple technology stories from the census. The first was showcasing how it allowed Citizens to collect the data, with all the pertinent geographical information, despite being collected in remote locations, kilometres offshore. The solution was to install ruggedised Dell devices on the various vessels that visit the reef, so that divers could upload their images as soon as they returned to their boat. These photos would be automatically uploaded for analysis once the vessels returned to shore.
The second was Dell Technologies development of an AI deep learning model that allowed volunteers to analyse these images faster. It reduced the time to examine 51,000 images from eight months to one week.
SBM’s challenge was to help Dell Technologies raise awareness about its work on this project, generating interest in the story not once, but over the course of several years as the story evolved to include not only the changing technology, but key developments such as the launch of the Stan documentary, Reefshot.
OUR IMPACT
Multiple Angles for Multiple Audiences
This story has many elements, which allowed us to tease out different angles for different media targets or even entice publications to cover the story more than once, with updated information.
Initial stories focused on the challenges in monitoring coral over an area the size of the reef and how rugged devices could both improve understanding of reef health and turn reef visitors into citizen scientists. This made it the perfect story for the scientific/technology journalists at general news publications. The success of the first Great Reef Census and the launch of the second one became the hook for the story a year later, and the target media was general interest technology publications.
A year on again, and the story had evolved considerably. Dell Technologies has developed a deep learning model that could map the borders of a coral in an image, so citizen scientists needed only to confirm that it was coral and the type of coral it was. This reduced the time volunteers spent on an image from seven minutes to under a minute.
The development allowed a dual approach. An Asia Pacific briefing call, held with Dell Technologies regional agency, Burson Global, provided an opportunity for technology journalists to get an understanding of the complex technology underpinning the analysis. Meanwhile, a media release explaining how AI was helping with reef conservation and how it informed decisions on which reefs to target for regeneration provided information needed to turn it into a story for local and general news media.
Overall, SBM’s work with Dell Technologies generated more than 100 stories over three years on its support of Citizens of The Reef.
Services
Public relations
