Two Ways to Use AI for School Storytelling (and Why Most Schools Skip the Important One)

Mindset 1: AI as Editorial Assistant

Think of yourself as the editor-in-chief. You have the strategy, the judgment, and the deep understanding of your audience. AI does the heavy lifting under your direction. You’re not outsourcing the thinking. You’re delegating the execution.

In this mode, you feed AI your school story and assign it specific tasks. Here’s where it earns its keep.

Outlines and structure. Before you write a single word of a viewbook, a blog post, or an annual fund appeal, ask AI to build the outline. Give it your story, give it your audience, and let it organize the thinking before you start writing. This one habit alone will save you hours — and it means everything you produce is rooted in your story from the very first line.

Repurposing existing content. You’ve already done the thinking and the writing. Now let AI extend its reach. That article you wrote for the school newsletter can become a parent email. Those welcome sequences you send to new inquiry families can become an evergreen series. You’re not starting from scratch — you’re making the most of the work you’ve already invested in.

Content details. Meta descriptions. Social captions. Event blurbs. Alternative email subject lines for A/B testing. These are the small but necessary tasks that eat up a disproportionate amount of time. AI generates strong options fast, so you can choose what resonates rather than staring at a blank page.

Voice of customer mining. This one is underused and genuinely powerful. When I come back from a full day of campus interviews — talking to students, faculty, administrators, heads of school — I have hours of recordings and pages of notes. I feed all of it to Claude and ask it to surface the distinctive words and phrases that kept coming up. The specific way a parent described what she was looking for. The way a teacher talked about his students. That language becomes the raw material for everything that follows. And it saves hours of manual analysis.

The throughline in all of these: you are always making the strategic decisions. You’re shaping what comes back. AI is never in the lead.

Mindset 2: AI as Senior Editor

This is the mindset I find more valuable — and the one most communicators skip entirely.

Write first. Don’t open AI. Don’t look at a prompt. Just write, using your school story as your guide, and get something real on the page. Then bring AI in — not to create, but to critique. Think of it as handing your draft to a senior editor whose job is to push back, find what’s missing, and flag what isn’t working.

Here’s how I use AI in this role.

Find the holes. Ask it: what feels underdeveloped? What questions might a skeptical parent still have after reading this? We all have blind spots, especially when we’ve been living with a school’s story for a long time. AI gives you a second set of eyes that doesn’t share your assumptions.

Flag vague language. This might be the most useful prompt in my arsenal. Which phrases in this piece could belong to any independent school? Where am I not specific enough? The answers are almost always illuminating — and fixable, once you can see them clearly.

Audit for negative connotations. Are there words or phrases that could be misread — that might feel exclusive, or cold, or off-putting to the families you’re trying to reach? Language that feels natural internally sometimes reads very differently to an outside audience. AI catches this more reliably than a tired editor at the end of a long week.

Sharpen the hook. Does this open with something a parent actually cares about — or does it lead with the school? This is an audience-first check, and it’s especially useful after you’ve conducted voice-of-customer research. You want to make sure that work is showing up where it matters most: in the first few lines, before a reader has any reason to keep going.

Check the voice. If you’ve defined your school’s personality, make sure it’s reflected in the final output. Content drift is real. AI can help you catch places where the tone went sideways — where institutional jargon crept in instead of the warm, confident voice your school actually has.

The Consistent Component

Both mindsets have something in common: in neither one is AI doing the strategic thinking. It’s not deciding who your school is. It’s not figuring out what makes you different. It’s not discovering the phrase a teacher uses that turns out to be the most authentic thing about your community. Those insights are human. That work is yours.

AI cannot walk your hallways. It cannot sit across from a parent and hear what she’s actually worried about. It cannot capture the lived feeling of your school — the culture that makes families say this is where my child belongs.

The story is yours to build. Once it exists — once it’s clear and specific and true — AI becomes a tool that actually works. Until then, you’re just asking a mirror to show you something it hasn’t seen.

Story first. Strategy second. Then AI.