We put a lot into our websites. The pages look good, the content is thorough, and we assume families will move through it the way we mapped it out. Then we actually look at the data and realize a lot of them are not navigating it at all. They are researching on their own time, often late at night when no one is at the desk, and showing up as fully formed applicants we have never spoken to.

In this episode, I sit down with Angela Brown from Halda AI, Stephanie Vasta of Moravian Academy, and Lori Kriegel of Wooster School to talk about what happens when you put a chatbot in front of those families. Two of them are running chatbots in their admissions and marketing right now, and Angela works with schools implementing them every day. What comes up is less about the technology itself and more about what it reveals about how families actually research a school.

In This Episode, We Discuss:

Why students, not just parents, are using the chatbot and how their questions shape the enrollment decision.
Why current families lean on it as much as prospective ones, from game times to the parent handbook.
Choosing a closed chatbot that answers only from your own content instead of pulling from Reddit or Wikipedia.
How chat logs expose gaps in your site and surface audiences you did not expect, like prospective employees.
Moving information into a knowledge base instead of piling more pages onto the website.
Front-loading affordability so the admissions team spends its human time with right-fit families.
Testing answers in Spanish and Mandarin and treating multilingual support as a recruitment advantage.
What the first 30 days actually require and where the handoff from bot to human should live.