Please note that Merit AI is included with every Merit account. It will fall under the Mentions tab if your institution subscribes to Merit's media monitoring services. If not, you will find Merit AI on the Achievements tab.
Your institution is already publishing student news in a variety of locations on your website. Merit AI is an artificial intelligence tool that lets you repurpose your content as Merit achievements, Newsroom press releases or simply post them to students' Merit pages. It allows you to share these campus news stories with students, parents, local media, high schools and government officials.
Note: To get the most out of Merit AI, we recommend that you perform student imports at the start of each semester. Learn more about importing students.
Adding Feeds
To get started, you will need to add your organization's RSS feeds to your Merit account. You can add as many feeds as you'd like to Merit AI. Some examples include campus news, athletics, arts, and other student news feeds.
To add a feed, click on the Feeds option in the toolbar:
Here, you will want to enter your newsfeed URLs in the RSS Feeds box:
Click the Manage your feeds button to review, enable or disable any of the feeds you've previously added:
Merit AI Discoveries
Once the RSS feeds on your website have been added and your students imported, Merit AI will regularly scan these feeds looking for news about your students.
When the name in an article matches one or more of your students, you will see an alert in your Merit AI/Mentions Inbox. You will see an RSS icon next to every Merit AI discovery and a silhouette indicating the number of students identified:
Note: If a story does not have the RSS icon, it came from outside your organization's website and cannot be turned into a Merit achievement or Newsroom press release.
Click on a discovery to view more information about this story. This will display a summary of the story and a list of matching Merit students:
Here's a brief summary of the sub-sections appearing on this page:
- Keywords Mentioned - The keywords that helped identify the story as coming from your institution will be highlighted here.
- Students Matched in This Story - The names of students with Merit pages will be highlighted here.
- Other People Mentioned - The names of any individuals in the story who did not match up to Merit pages will be highlighted here. Note: Students may appear here if their Merit page uses a different name than what appears in the discovery (e.g. David/Dave).
- Images - Photos and logos from the discovery will appear here but can be removed if necessary.
Repurposing Merit AI Content
At the bottom of a Merit AI discovery page, you will see Achievement, Press Release and Post to Merit Page buttons. These buttons allow you to repurpose the discovery through Merit:
Here's some more information about each option. Follow the links to learn more:
| This will take you into Merit's achievement workflow. The text and images from the online discovery will be automatically added for you. Merit will also automatically include the students identified in this story in your achievement. | This will take you into Newsroom's press release workflow. The text and images from the online discovery will be automatically added to your press release. Merit will also automatically include the students identified in this story in your press release. | This will add a link to the online story on your institution's website to these students' Merit pages. |
| Learn more about turning a discovery into an achievement | Learn more about turning a discovery into a press release | Learn more about posting links to students' Merit pages |