And Carrie On

Later this week, a colleague is taking my place on a panel to talk about ChatGPT. As we were prepping for the panel, we talked through a few ways our team was using ChatGPT, and she encouraged me that this would be a great blog or presentation post.

With that in mind, here are five use cases that I’ve found in higher education for ChatGPT.

Use Cases in Higher Education

Here are a few use cases we’ve developed to help our team work effectively.

First – All the quotes.

As communicators, it’s not uncommon that we have news stories. Often times, we get told to “just make me sound intelligent.” After a while, it gets hard to write a new quote for someone, so ChatGPT is a great tool to craft quotes for our colleagues across campus. We give it some high level talking points, and it can put together a few sample quote options that we can send to the professor or the administrator for approval.

Two – On-brand messaging.

We built TrojanGPT, which is a custom GPT. This involved giving the GPT our brand pillars, messaging guide, sample print materials, and website pages that explain the university experience. We also gave it overall language notes such as tone and who our traditional student and audience is. This process took about an hour to complete. Once we built this, the custom GPT is fantastic at helping us with messaging to prospective students and also current students. For example, we used it to help us reframe a few viewbook spreads, and what would have been a several-day task was completed in a few hours. We are excited to experiment with this even more in the next few months.

Three – Crisis communications.

One of the things we’ve been working on is updating crisis messaging. The goal is to have email, social media, and texting messages pre-written and approved, well in advance of any crisis. ChatGPT is great at this. We’ve given it the guidelines of what each platform allows, and it has given us sample messages for some of the more likely crisis situations. Now, we are able to use those as a starting point and take them to the crisis committee to finesse and adjust as needed. However, it’s saved us significant time of generating those starting messages.

Four – Pulse checks.

Often times we’re asked to help promote an initiative or plan an experience. We as MarComm leaders are pretty good at this, but it’s great to have a trusted advisor. We tend to use ChatGPT in this role to review what we’ve put together and share ideas that might be missing, aspects we should consider further, or other feedback to improve the overall experience. As we are often managing multiple projects or things at any given time, having an advisor to assess if we’ve thought of everything is so valuable and so nice. It helps us to have confidence there will be fewer misses because we’ve thought of things in advance.

Five – Administrative tasks.

While not nearly as sexy or as fun, this is another area where ChatGPT excels. When I need help with an email to make sure it sounds professional but still firm., ChatGPT can help. When I need to put together a proposal for a concept or a new job description, ChatGPT can help me quickly do those things. These kinds of tasks are things that help me continually put my best foot forward but aren’t the things I enjoy spending my time on, so it’s nice to be able to employ ChatGPT for this purpose.

A Word of Caution

While I use ChatGPT on the regular, I would encourage you to think critcally about it. As a leader, ChatGPT doesn’t not have universal authority to be your brand. Instead, it’s important to use it as a tool. Jaime Hunt has referred to it as an intern. I think either works. You would never trust a tool with pausing to see if it feels right. In the same way, you would never use an intern’s project and turn it in without reviewing it.

Sometimes our review is an internal team. Sometimes it’s going to a full committee. Regardless, this is a part of effective use, and it can’t be emphasized enough. If you’re going to use the tool, it’s critical that you review the work and finesse it to make sure it meets your needs.

In the panel we were prepping for, that was a theme that kept coming forward — ChatGPT will change how we as MarComm leaders work. Instead of crafting things from scratch, we’ll be able to use this tool/intern to help us. Then, we’ll be able to use our strategic brand understanding to edit, finesse, and refine the tool’s work to meet our unique and specific needs.

How are you using these tools?

I would love to hear how you’re using the tool and how you’re thinking about ChatGPT. Feel free to add a comment and let’s keep the conversation going.