Earshot measures one thing: whether the community around a specific infrastructure project accepts it, and which way that acceptance is moving.
Who is behind it
Earshot was founded by Nevin McClintock, and is built and delivered by Answer Consulting, an Australian firm (ABN 90 074 185 256). The methodology, the source model and the scoring approach are his. His professional background is on LinkedIn.
Why Earshot exists
Australia measures social licence at the national level. The CSIRO and the federal government run a national sentiment survey, and it is a genuinely useful read on how the country feels about the energy transition overall.
But projects are not approved or refused nationally. They are approved or refused in a shire, a valley, a stretch of coastline — by the few thousand people who live closest to them. A developer can know precisely how Australians feel about renewables in general and still have no measured read on the community around their own transmission corridor.
The usual alternative is commissioned research: a survey or sentiment report, run periodically, delivered as a snapshot. It is valuable, but it always describes a moment that has already passed, and opposition compounds in the gaps between reports. A local Facebook group, a council deputation, a landholder dispute — these build over weeks, not quarters.
Earshot exists to close that gap. One named project, re-read on a set cadence, scored the same way every time.
Why the framework matters
Social licence has long been easy to talk about and hard to measure, which is what makes it easy to argue about and hard to manage. Earshot scores against the social licence graph published by CSIRO researchers Scott A. and Corrine M. Condie in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (12:433, 2025). It maps community interest against net social acceptability and places a project in a defined zone rather than on a vague spectrum.
Using a published, peer-reviewed framework rather than a proprietary one matters for a specific reason: a reading is comparable over time and between projects, and anyone can go and read the method for themselves. It is not a black box.
Earshot applies published, peer-reviewed CSIRO research. It is an independent product, not affiliated with or endorsed by CSIRO.
How it is delivered
Earshot is not software you are left to operate. Every project is set up by an analyst — its footprint, its host community, the decision-makers, the comparable projects nearby — and every read is interpreted before it reaches you. Between those conversations, your team signs in to a dashboard showing where the project sits, which way it is moving and what is driving the shift.
The cadence is the level of engagement: a monthly read for a pre-lodgement site, a weekly read through assessment, a daily read on something already contested. Daily is the fastest cadence offered. Whichever level, the first read is delivered at onboarding rather than at the next calendar boundary.