December 17, 2025 - This year, Penta partnered with Georgetown University’s Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) program to sponsor a data-driven capstone project tackling one of the biggest challenges facing organizations today: understanding who is influencing public policy narratives and how they impact the conversation.
Over the past five months, two teams of graduate students worked closely with Penta leaders to build an end-to-end analytical system that helps answer this deceptively difficult question.
Their solution: AI-built prototype “Narrative Influencer Tool,” powered by Penta’s rich media intelligence dataset and an integrated pipeline of natural language processing, clustering, and influence modeling. The result is a scalable framework that identifies emerging narratives, maps how ideas move from social platforms to traditional media, and highlights the people—both expected and unexpected—who drive these conversations.
The capstone team began with a question Penta confronts daily: With millions of posts, articles, and voices active at once, how can we quickly understand where a narrative begins and who meaningfully shapes it?
The project involved designing a unified schema for social and news content, developing a clustering model for narrative themes, linking tweets to news articles, building an influence scoring system based on timing, reach, and cross-media pickup, and creating a working dashboard to visualize narrative pathways, leaderboards, and spikes.
Over the course of the project, the students uncovered several dynamics essential to modern public affairs and reputation management:
These insights validated Penta’s core belief: that narratives are measurable, mappable, and increasingly shaped by cross-platform interactions. The project also demonstrated the strength of Penta’s dataset in enabling sophisticated analytics that support real-time advisory work.
Both the Georgetown team and Penta saw tremendous value in the collaboration. The students emphasized the significance of having access to a real-world, high-stakes dataset:
“Our partnership with Penta allowed our students to tackle a real narrative intelligence problem and gain hands-on experience building solutions that bridge advanced analytics, language modeling, and practical impact. These kinds of collaborations and projects are what prepare the next generation of analytics professionals to create meaningful business value.” - Babak Zafari, Academic Director of Georgetown University's MSBA program
And for Penta, the project showcased the next generation of analytics talent:
“This partnership was a fantastic opportunity to see the future of data science and public affairs talent in action. The students not only built a powerful, working prototype but demonstrated how quickly top talent can translate complex data analysis into actionable insights. It confirms our belief that strong university partnerships are essential for driving innovation and recruiting the next generation of Penta leaders." - Andrea Christianson, Partner at Penta Group
The collaboration demonstrated what happens when academic innovation meets real-world problem solving: students gain hands-on experience with complex public affairs data, and Penta benefits from fresh perspectives and emerging technical approaches.
Building on the students’ recommendations, we look forward to continuing to strengthen the analytical tools that help organizations navigate today’s fast-moving information environment.