Sprout Social Announces Winners of the Inaugural 2026 Social Intelligence Awards

City of Hope, Cornerstone Building Brands, Atlas Copco Group, Teranet and ETS honored for turning social data into enterprise-wide strategy, proactive customer care and measurable ROI

CHICAGO, Aug. 31, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sprout Social (Nasdaq: SPT), the AI-powered Social Intelligence Platform, today announced the winners of its inaugural 2026 Social Intelligence Awards, honoring brands and visionaries who have moved beyond basic metrics to uncover deep insights, scale proactive care and drive measurable ROI. The awards recognize five organizations using Sprout Social to turn social data into a tangible business advantage.

Winners were recognized across five categories, each tied to a core area of Sprout's AI-powered Social Intelligence Platform: Full-Funnel Social Optimization, Predictive Media Intelligence, Scalable Social Support, Authentic Brand Amplification, and the flagship award, Best in Social Intelligence, incorporating all categories. Using capabilities like Social Listening, Analytics and Engagement, honorees sharpened their strategies, scaled their customer care and extended their brand's reach.

“This year's winners show us where social is headed,” said Scott Morris, CMO of Sprout Social. “Each of these teams treated social as a front-line source for understanding and connecting with their customers, not in theory, but in daily practice. They used Sprout's platform and social intelligence to change how their entire organization listens, responds and makes decisions. That's the real story here: when you give teams the right tools, social has the potential to become one of the clearest windows a business has into the people it serves.”

Best in Social Intelligence Award – City of Hope

City of Hope, one of the largest and most advanced cancer research and treatment organizations in the country, used social intelligence to build a truly community-driven campaign that resonated deeply with its audience. Their social team used Sprout Social Listening to study what patients, survivors, caregivers and supporters were already saying online. Those findings shaped the City of Hope Line, a campaign that invites the community to record and share their own messages of hope through installations at five physical locations and a phone line. Now in its second year, the campaign has helped City of Hope earn its first-ever social Telly Awards wins and Webby nominations, along with sustained double-digit growth in engagement, reach and video views. That success has carried beyond the social team: departments across philanthropy, thought leadership and internal communications now weave the same social-first insight into their everyday work, making social intelligence a resource the whole organization draws on.

“Social intelligence gave us a deeper understanding of what mattered most to our community and helped us turn those insights into meaningful experiences that invite people to connect and share hope. The result is a more audience-centered approach that strengthens how we engage the patients and families we are privileged to serve.” — Nisha Morris, Senior Vice President, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at City of Hope

Precision Impact Award – Cornerstone Building Brands

Cornerstone Building Brands runs 35 individual brands, each with its own lean marketing team, and is proving that scale doesn't have to mean slower decisions. Their team centralized reporting across the portfolio using Analytics, Competitor Analysis and Social Listening in Sprout Social, replacing brand-by-brand manual reports with automated, brand-specific insight every team could act on immediately. On Home for Good, Cornerstone's annual affordable-housing campaign with Habitat for Humanity, that insight showed static posts performed best with employee advocates while video and carousel content drove stronger results with external audiences, a finding that reshaped the campaign's content mix. Year over year, campaign impressions grew 122.4% to more than 3 million, engagements rose 75.3% and post link clicks increased 42.5%.

"Rather than asking each business unit to become experts in social intelligence, we centralized the analysis and delivered customized, automated reports tailored to each brand's goals and challenges." — Chelsey Godfrey, Social Media Marketing Specialist, Cornerstone Building Brands

Social Synergy Award – Teranet

Teranet Inc., a property intelligence and land registry company, turned a handful of loyal users into one of its most effective distribution channels, using Sprout Social Listening to find mortgage brokers who already had credibility and reach in their own community. Their team tracked signals like LinkedIn activity, industry award nominations and speaking engagements to identify brokers already talking about PurView, Teranet's B2B property intelligence platform, unprompted, then built a scored ambassador program around them. Across the program's tagged posts since launch, PurView has generated more than 12,500 impressions, with roughly 90% of reach coming from people who had never followed the brand before.

"We realized these weren't just satisfied customers, they were untapped distribution channels with pre-built trust that brand content could never replicate." — Maria Policelli-Sohrabi, Digital and Social Media Marketing Manager, Teranet Inc.

Infinite Care Award – ETS

ETS manages social care across its portfolio of testing brands, including GRE, TOEFL, and Praxis, through a centralized model led by Jessica Dillon, Social Media Community Specialist. Using AI-powered sentiment and topic tagging in Sprout's Smart Inbox, Dillon transformed recurring inquiries into actionable insights, helping teams identify emerging trends and prioritize engagement in real time. In one instance, a test taker's questions regarding a disability accommodation were quickly surfaced and routed to the appropriate team, enabling ETS to provide a timely, informed, and empathetic response. During this period, GRE message volume increased 64% year over year while response times remained within a 3-hour service-level agreement. Corporate response time improved from two hours to one hour and 20 minutes, and negative sentiment associated with the Praxis brand decreased by 93%.

"The questions test takers asked most often helped shape new social community content and FAQ resources, allowing us to provide answers earlier, reduce uncertainty and better support learners when they needed it most." — Jessica Dillon, Social Media Community Specialist, ETS

Predictive Edge Award – Atlas Copco Group

Atlas Copco Group, a global manufacturer of industrial equipment, built an early-warning system for brand risk across dozens of business areas, brands and local markets, using signals hiding in plain sight. The team used Sprout Social Listening to track patterns like repeated questions, off-brand content and inactive local accounts across every market at once, surfacing which accounts needed support long before a minor gap could grow into a larger issue. Rather than turning that visibility into an audit, Atlas built it into a support system, with training, feedback and a clear escalation path for local teams in place of after-the-fact correction.

To learn more about Sprout Social's AI-powered Social Intelligence Platform or to schedule a demo, please visit sproutsocial.com.

About Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a leading AI-powered social intelligence platform, built on the belief that All Business is Social℠. Powered by Trellis, Sprout’s proprietary AI agent, the platform is designed to transform real-time social media signals into actionable insights that drive business forward. Consistently recognized as a top software by G2, Sprout enables brands to deliver smarter, faster business impact through a suite of solutions including comprehensive publishing and engagement, customer care, influencer marketing, advocacy and predictive media intelligence. Sprout’s software operates across all major social networks and digital platforms. For more information about Sprout Social (NASDAQ: SPT), visit sproutsocial.com.

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