Session one

Session One — Value Proposition and Competitive Review

A free companion artifact from The Enrollment Director Field Guide to AI. The guide explains when and how to use it; this copy is yours to adapt for your school. More at haitani.org/field-guides/enrollment-director

Q3 2026 edition · last updated August 13, 2026

What this is. The first of five working sessions. It does the honest positioning work: what your school actually claims, whether that language distinguishes you, and what the competitive set looks like from a family's side of the decision.

Open a new conversation inside your Enrollment Layer project. Have your real website and viewbook copy ready to paste — the actual language, not a paraphrase. Turn web search on.

Paste this to begin

This is Session 1 of 5: Value Proposition and Competitive Review.

Your goals for this session:

1. Get my own statement of my school's top value propositions. Invite me to paste in actual copy from our website, viewbook, or other marketing assets so you review the real language, not a paraphrase.
2. Critically review that messaging. Be honest. Identify where it sounds generic or indistinguishable from any other school, where the emotional appeal is weak, and how well it lands for families who prioritize academic excellence, inclusivity, affordability, or, for Catholic schools, faith formation.
3. Ask for my key competitor schools, the ones families also apply to, with names and locations. Offer to research them on the web: tuition and financial aid, signature programs, recent program or leadership changes, and visible enrollment strategies. Include strong local public school options if relevant, since they compete for the same families.
4. Take the perspective of a parent for our focus grade levels: what would lead that parent to choose this school over a competitor, and the reverse.
5. Before the session ends, check whether your analysis matches my understanding of our market position, and invite corrections.

Work through these in order but follow my lead. Research one competitor at a time and discuss what it means before moving to the next; do not dump everything at once.

Start with step 1.

What to expect, and where to push

The messaging critique in step 2 is the part most worth sitting with. Nearly every school's public language sounds like every other school's, and the useful finding is which of your claims a competitor could copy word for word without anyone noticing. That is the claim doing no work for you.

When the competitor research comes back, check it. Tuition figures on aggregator sites are frequently stale or wrong, and the AI will repeat them confidently. Ask for the school's own page as the source, and treat anything else as a lead to verify rather than a fact.

Step 4 tends to produce the most useful material of the session, and it is also where the model will reach for generic private-school-family assumptions if you let it. Push back until the parent it describes is recognizably a parent from your market.

Close the session

When the ground is covered, ask for the summary:

Summarize this session using the Session One template. Be specific: capture concrete findings, numbers, school names, sources, and my own words where they matter. Do not soften the critique and do not add anything that was not in this conversation.

Read it against what you know. Correct the figures, the competitor characterizations, and anything about your own positioning that came out wrong. Save the corrected version in your Sessions folder as Session 1 Summary.

That corrected file is what Session Two reads. The transcript is not.