Reputation, Authority & Influence Index

Purpose

RAII exists to separate three things that reputation research routinely collapses: what an institution is recognised for, what audiences experience of it, and what that recognition converts into when a decision is being made.

The index is diagnostic rather than competitive. A composite score is only meaningful next to its pillar spread — the distance between an institution's strongest and weakest pillar usually contains the actual strategy.

The eight pillars

Each pillar is scored 0–100 and carries its own confidence status. Pillars are never averaged across institutions with different mandates.

• Institutional Authority — Statutory mandate, regulatory standing and convening power are documented and unambiguous.
• Earned Reputation — 430 public mentions with 86.5% positive tone and only 0.9% negative.
• Media Authority — 134 unique domains carrying NIPR, with concentration in a small set of high-authority outlets.
• Leadership Authority — Leadership is visible and quoted; institutionalisation of that visibility is still forming.
• African Competitiveness — Directional, mandate-adjusted comparison against five national peer institutes.
• Digital Discoverability — Findable but fragmented across chapter, event and affiliate domains.
• AI/GEO Authority — 15 of 20 measurement units complete. Presence and citation are strong; recommendation is not.
• Voice of Constituency — Member experience, not institutional legitimacy. 40 qualitative entries.

How the composite is calculated

The composite is the unweighted mean of the eight pillar scores. For this edition: 92 + 88 + 86 + 84 + 82 + 76 + 70 + 62 = 640, and 640 divided by 8 is 80.

No pillar is weighted above another. Weighting would require a defensible statement of which dimension of reputation matters more for a statutory institute, and AGENTPR does not publish one. If a weighted model is introduced in a future edition, the weights will be published here in the same release as the score.

The composite is reported to the nearest whole number and is never presented as more precise than the pillars it is built from.

Interpretation

A high composite with a wide pillar spread indicates conversion risk, not reputation risk. A narrow spread at a moderate composite is usually healthier than a wide spread at a high composite.

Scores are read against the institution's own mandate. Comparison across institutions is territory-based and directional; AGENTPR does not publish national league tables where statutory models are not equivalent.

Confidence principle

Every pillar declares high, medium, low or provisional confidence. Unknown is never encoded as zero, and a provisional pillar is never presented as settled. Where a measurement frame is incomplete, the incompleteness is published alongside the score.