18 AI use cases independent school staff haven't discovered yet
We've spent a year and half training faculty in AI, but what about our staff? Advancement, marcom, HR, EAs, admissions, and the business office can all benefit from these use cases.
Why should independent schools care about these AI use cases? Efficiency is only a small part of the answer. We’re not General Electric. For a school whose operations budget is covered, a 5% improvement in efficiency doesn’t matter much. What matters for independent schools is culture, family relationships, and the feeling people get when they interact with us. It turns out AI can help us with that too.
The following use cases were developed by interviewing over 30 independent school staff members, leaders, and consultants.
1. Style Guide Checker
Problem: Most schools use style guides to standardize communications and maintain a unified brand voice. But with multiple staff members posting over multiple channels, consistency can be hard to manage. Consistent brand voice is an integral part of how independent schools create trust and rapport with their audience.
Solution: Create a CustomGPT trained on your school’s style guide that can offer instant revisions and feedback to make sure your emails, newsletters, and social media posts are aligned with a single brand voice.
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2. Survey Insight Extractor
Problem: We conduct surveys to learn more about different stakeholder groups, annual events, and the effectiveness of communication strategies. But we aren’t always great at extracting insights from the data we receive or translating those insights into actionable steps for the future.
Solution: Use AI to find patterns, summarize large data sets, synthesize multiple sources of data, identify key phrases during “voice of customer” research, and create actionable insights. AI can help us create predictable models -- outputs -> outcomes ->impacts. Data insights are one way to get attention at the board level, leadership team level.
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Note: At its core, a predictable model is about understanding outputs → outcomes → impacts: “If we engage in X activities, we can expect Y results, leading to Z impact on the school.” For example, “If we invite 500 prospective families to an open house and 250 attend, we can expect 75 additional applications for the 9th grade and a 10% increase in matriculation.” AI can help develop, visualize, and track these models, allowing each department to forecast outcomes more accurately based on historical and real-time data.
4. Persona Creator
Problem: Admissions and Marketing Communications (MarCom) teams rely on personas to define their "ideal-fit families," ensuring their messaging resonates with key audience segments. Traditionally, persona creation can be a time-intensive process, requiring teams to manually analyze survey data and identify patterns.
Solution: AI streamlines this process by reviewing a large volume of survey responses and uncovering commonalities across respondents. With the ability to quickly identify trends in family demographics, motivations, and decision-making factors, AI can automatically generate personas that accurately reflect the underlying data, allowing teams to align their strategies more effectively and precisely with their audience's needs.
However, this use case necessitates the use of ChatGPT Teams to ensure enterprise-level data security. While personas don't contain direct identifiers of individual respondents, leveraging AI to analyze personal survey data requires safeguarding respondent information with robust privacy protections.
4. Handwritten Note Writer
Problem: Independent schools value a personal touch. But writing by hand is time consuming and difficult to do for bulk or scheduled communications like invitations, thank you notes, contribution reminders, or repeated events like birthdays or holidays.
Solution: Use a combination of LLMs and “Handwrytten” to automate handwritten correspondences.
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5. Time Management Tool
Problem: Staff members wear multiple hats and often struggle with being pulled in too many directions at once. We have long to-do lists that can be hard to prioritize and schedule.
Solution: Tackle your to-do list in partnership with an AI. AIs are great at prioritizing, creating schedules, breaking tasks down into manageable parts.
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6. Visual Design Checker
Problem: Staff members across multiple departments are routinely creating visual designs for announcements, invitations, promotional materials etc. but few of them have a background in design. That means that we are often creating designs that fail to adhere to important design principles which make for effective communication and engender a sense of trust in our audience.
Solution: Use a Custom GPT to get instant feedback on your designs. Review this document for extra information about important design principles.
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7. Appeal Letter Personalizer
Problem: Staff who work in the advancement office spend a lot of time writing appeal letters and acknowledgements for annual giving, capital campaigns, planned giving, and major gifts. We know how important it is to personalize those communications, tell a compelling story, and make the donor’s impact clear. But it’s time consuming.
Solution: Use the new “AI Acknowledgements” tool from Raiser’s Edge for more efficient acknowledgements and ChatGPT to draft more personalized appeal letters based on constituency and area of interest. Note: Raiser’s Edge “AI Acknowledgements” launched in April 2024 and may not yet be available in all regions of the US.
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8. Receipt Reconciliation Assistant
Problem: Independent schools often have dozens of credit cards dispersed across various departments. Business office staff spend a significant amount of time reviewing expense forms and receipts, cross-referencing them with account statements, checking for discrepancies, and assigning each expense to the correct account code.
Solution: First, buy a “ChatGPT Teams” account for OpenAI’s enterprise standard of data privacy. Then create a Custom GPT with a list of your school’s account codes in the knowledge base and the following prompt instructions:
You are an expert in independent school accounting. I will upload a folder of expense forms with their respective receipts, as well as a folder of bank statements for various school credit cards. Your job is to reconcile the expenses from the receipts with the corresponding transactions on the bank statement. The output should be presented in a grid format that includes:
the purchaser's name,
the credit card account,
any discrepancies (such as mismatched amounts, missing receipts, or missing descriptions),
and a suggested {school_name} account code based on the description of each expense.
9. Teacher Page Personalizer & SEO Tool
Problem: Web traffic data trends suggest that new visitors to a school’s website are increasingly interested in learning about the faculty. For schools that invest in those pages beyond the utilitarian “directory,” they are finding that these pages tend to be the 3rd or 4th most visited — just behind the landing page at #1 and the tuition information page at #2. The problem is that it can be hard to reach out to every member of the faculty and gather compelling content that is standardized and high quality.
Solution: Have faculty fill out a Google Form with fields that prompt them to reflect on their backgrounds as educators, what makes them passionate about the classroom, and their areas of expertise. We want to have the EEAT acronym in mind — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These are the qualities of high value content that drives your site’s SEO ranking. Having every faculty member create a LinkedIn page that links to their respective teacher pages will also boost your SeO.
Once all the faculty have filled out the Google Form, navigate to the “Responses” tab and click “View in Sheets” to open the responses up in an excel style format. Export that document and upload it into GPT Teams (security needed for this use case) with the prompt below:
“I am going to send you survey responses collected from our faculty members. You job is to review their answers and to reformat them. You will output 3 things for each survey respondent: the name of the respondent, a verbatim copy of their original survey answers, and a revised copy that has had all grammar and spelling issues resolved. Your revised copy will make small edits to emphasize experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. The revised copy will also shift everything from 1st person to 3rd person, using either the first name of the respondent or the pronoun they've indicated on the survey.”
10. Content Reformatter
Problem: Admissions, advancement, and MarCom have to generate a lot of content - videos, podcast interviews, articles, social media posts, etc. Taking the time to write, for example, a social media post promoting an article or an article summarizing a podcast interview is time consuming.
Solution: LLMs are excellent at reformatting content from one form into another. In the video below, I show how I can take a 30 minute interview, get a transcript from it using a free tool called ReStream, and use a CustomGPT to generate an article summarizing the interview and social media post promoting it. As a special bonus step, I demonstrate how I can use Google’s NotebookLM to reformat my AI-generated article back into podcast with synthetic AI speakers.
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11. Lead Generator / Customer Information Collector
Problem: Lead generation for independent schools is difficult because traditional outreach methods often fail to capture the attention of families who aren't actively searching for new schools. Building meaningful relationships requires a deeper understanding of prospective families' needs and values, making it hard to craft personalized outreach that resonates. Additionally, without the right tools, gathering useful data for follow-up can be inefficient, limiting the ability to nurture leads effectively.
Solution: Consider a tool called ScoreApp. ScoreApp allows you and your team to use AI to build custom quizzes for your prospective families or donors that gather important information while delivering something of value. What is great about ScoreApp is that the results page and the information on it depends entirely on the score that user received, giving them a personalized experience. With ScoreApp, we are able to offer users something of value that is tailored to the user’s needs and to then package it in a fun, engaging quiz experience.
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12. Video Language Translator
Problem: Some of our students come from families that do not speak English as their first language or who may not speak English at all. We do not want to exclude these families out of our outreach efforts, but we may not have staff at the school who are fluent in all the languages spoken by our current student families.
Solution: Use HeyGen to create translated video content. HeyGen will translate videos from English into one of 40+ languages. It even moves the speaker’s mouth to make it appear as though they are speaking the language. If, for example, a school were to email a video of the head of school welcoming all first year students, they could easily include links to alternate videos in any number of languages represented in that first year class. This is also a tool that could easily be used to market to families overseas. One important note: AI translation is not perfect, and the video manipulation HeyGen can be a bit “uncanny valley.” It’s a good idea to disclose from the beginning of the video that it was made using AI technology. The trend in academia is toward citation and disclosure. Remember, “trust” is our currency.
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(The video above was uploaded into HeyGen and translated from English to Spanish using an AI vocal clone.)
13. Mentor Matchmaker
Problem: A 2008 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that mentorship programs significantly improve the retention rate of school employees. But how should schools match new faculty and staff with their mentor when there are so many possible combinations?
Solution: Use ChatGPT Teams to match questionnaire responses from returning employee mentors with responses turned in by new employee mentees. AI can quickly and effectively assess compatibility and highlight areas of potential conflict.
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14. New Employee Onboarding Bot
Problem: New employees may be overwhelmed by their transition into a new school and be unsure of where to find the answers to all their questions. Additionally, the types of questions they have may be in areas that are sensitive or areas they perceive as intimidating or complex.
Solution: This HR problem can be addressed with a CustomGPT FAQ bot with a custom knowledge base. If you are curious to read the transcripts and gather more information about the types of questions new employees are asking, Voiceflow is a better option that ChatGPT Teams.
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15. Resume Screening Tool
Problem: It’s not uncommon for a school to receive over 100 applications for a single open position. But how can a school ensure that they are screening for applicants who are mission aligned and have the right skills? How can schools decide between similarly qualified finalists?
Solution: Use GPT Teams to first extract a list of skills from the job description and then sort resumes and cover letters based on the degree to which those applicants are exhibiting those skills.
Ethics Note: There are multiple ethics considerations for a use case like this. First, this necessitates the use of GPT Teams since we are uploading personally identifiable information. Second, this technology is not yet at a level of sophistication where it should act alone as a hiring decision maker. AI should be in a supporting role only. Third, AI systems are trained on a corpus of data that engenders the model with a perspective that is predominantly white, male, and western. It is not yet clear to what degree it is possible to counterbalance that algorithmic bias in the prompt directions we give. Lastly, we don’t want to end up in a position where AI generated resumes are being evaluated by AI screening tools. We should be thinking about new, authentic ways of assessing candidates: short video demonstrations, metacognitive reflections, artifact or case study portfolios, responses to formative feedback allowing for iteration, etc.
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16. Professional Development Tool
Problem: Independent schools typically allocate more time and resources for faculty PD than they do for staff PD. Is there a way we can use AI to create educational experiences for staff that can be offered asynchronously, remotely, and at scale?
Solution: Use Voiceflow to create PD training experiences for staff. Voiceflow allows you to have much more control over the user experience than you would have with a Custom GPT. With Voiceflow, you can direct the learner though a journey with multiple choice questions, video content, photos, and free response reflections all within an AI chat interface.
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17. Registrar
Problem: The registration process is a cumbersome and time consuming process for an independent school. The amount of conditional logic is overwhelming. Students who don’t earn a B in Drawing 1 cannot take Advanced Drawing. Mrs. Doe can’t teach 7th period in the fall because it conflicts with field hockey. Etc. Etc. Etc.
Solution: Use Timely. Timely links to your SIS and uses advanced algorithms to manage course requests and scheduling. They have a student first approach and intuitive design. Timely’s analytics will help you understand what kind of workload is being assigned to each teacher and make better staffing decisions.
18. Honorable mentions…
Note taking tools like Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai can attend and transcribe virtual meetings, providing action items and key points. LLMs like ChatGPT can also scan your handwritten meeting notes.
Struggling to draft an email? LLMs make a great co-pilot. This is especially true in an emotionally charged situation or when summarizing a lot of information into a short email.
Interested in a lunch and learn PD webinar for your staff? Let’s set up a meeting to chat about your needs and what that could look like at your school. Calendly Link