What sharing our AI work has taught us

We’ve been doing more speaking recently and there’s something really enjoyable about sharing work we’re doing with clients, explaining the process behind it and giving other people something they can try.

This year, AI has been a recurring theme in our webinars, presentations and workshops. We’ve covered prompting, synthetic audiences and ways AI projects can support schools liaison and sales teams.

The thinking behind a useful prompt

In one of our sessions we started with a simple request: write a social media post to promote a construction open day.

The result was familiar enough. Polite, generic copy about facilities and opportunities. It could have come from almost any college.

Then we gave it a fuller brief: the recruitment challenge, the audience, the relevant information, the tone and what we wanted the post to achieve. We separated the needs of school leavers from those of parents.

The output became more specific and useful.

That’s an exercise I like because it makes the role of the marketer visible. Someone still has to understand the audience, decide what matters, supply accurate information and judge the result.

Those are skills education marketers already bring. A structured prompt gives us a way to apply them.

Giving our assumptions a bit more scrutiny

Our Beyond Personas presentation explored another application: using synthetic audiences to question campaign ideas and messaging before they go live.

Personas can be useful, but only if they influence decisions. It’s easy to create a document describing your audiences, then pay little notice to it and carry on writing content in much the same way.

With a synthetic audience, you can use AI to simulate responses from personas informed by your research. You might explore where a course description could create uncertainty, or what questions an open event message leaves unanswered.

Absolutely we still need conversations with real people but used carefully this tool gives us another way to review our thinking.

Making better use of what school liaison teams already know

Teams build up knowledge about schools, contacts, visits and the activities they’ve delivered. But that information can sit across different documents, spreadsheets, inboxes and people’s memories.

Our Schools Intelligence Framework looks at how to organise that context and use it to support tasks such as preparing for a visit, adapting a workshop or drafting a follow-up.

The useful part is the connection to the team’s work. What do they need to know before a meeting? What information would help them plan their next activity? What should be recorded so a colleague can pick up the relationship?

AI can help work with that information, but the team still needs to keep it accurate and check what comes back.