As educators and education professionals who frequently email with learners, we’ve all felt it:
we have an important email to send, but we’re not sure how to get started
we need to deliver difficult news to several students but we can’t quite come up with the phrasing
we are communicating inconsistently with our students and need to get a shared script for the team
At some point, an overwhelming number of things to write—or an overwhelming blank page—catches up with us. An email or student communication gets pushed further and further down our to-do list, or simply goes unwritten. If we’d just had a way to “prep the page,” or a template to work from, we could have the momentum to get started.
So here at Ribbon, we started wondering—how could we create something that could prep the page for us?
Meet Our Student Outreach Email Generator
We decided to leverage the power of AI to create a tool that could help overcome the fear of the blank page, create better templates and scripts, or just help write student communications more quickly—and with less overwhelm.
The Ribbon Email Generator is a free, AI-powered tool that we’ve trained on the best templates and scripts from industry professionals. We’re continually improving it to ensure your emails and templates are backed by high performing email templates, and we’ve designed it to be super easy to use—no prompt engineering or prior AI knowledge necessary.
Since we’re educators ourselves, we know learning new technologies can be intimidating, which is why we’ve made ours super easy to use and educational. We’ve included prompting tips and quick lessons for using AI throughout the tool, so you can learn as you go.
So, how does it work? Well, it’s pretty self-explanatory, but we’ll give you a quick walk-through.
First, you’ll land on a page that has—for now—four sample situations, targeting common learner situations that require individual communication and tend to be difficult to write and scale.
Start by selecting the situation that makes the most sense for the learner communication you’re writing to, and remember that you can customize it further later. Once you’ve selected your situation, the system will prompt you for a desired outcome or action—what is it that you’d like the learner to do?
You can fill that in as relevant, then click draft email. Voila! That’s all you need to do — our message builder will draft up a template for you.
Once you have your initial template, you can customize it further based on the student situation or for tone — making it more professional or more supportive, for example.
You can send yourself the current draft, or keep adjusting it to be more similar to your own tone of voice. Either way, you now have a starting place to work from, allowing you to speed up processes and quickly build templates you can use for your whole class—or your whole team.
Why an Email Generator?
We built our email generator for student-facing staff we have worked with, talked to, and even been ourselves at one point. Any student-facing role or learner success professional has dozens, if not hundreds of pieces of student communication to write each week—and scaling all of this communication can be difficult. We wanted to create a tool that could solve numerous problems at once:
Blank page dilemma. When you just need momentum to get started, or you’re looking for an example of what “good” looks like, we knew that an AI-powered email generator could help create powerful templates that significantly speed up communication time.
Sharing examples. We don’t share your examples with others—and the results from our email generator will be slightly different each time based on your input. However, we’ve trained our generator on some of the best templates and scripts from other professionals in the industry, so your results will be backed by industry experience and expertise.
Creating templates. Sometimes you just need a batch of templates to work with—whether for yourself personally, for your team, or for new hires. Even if you’re a quick writer yourself, templating your most common emails can save lots of time in the long run, as well as make quality more consistent across your team. Our email message builder can help you quickly create templates for the most common problems and learner situations so you always have a good starting place.
Learning about ChatGPT. As former educators, we wanted the tool to also serve as a learning opportunity for folks to get more comfortable with ChatGPT, and give a glimpse of the potential with AI and ChatGPT in the education space. As an edtech company, we’re personally invested in using AI to make education better—for both learners and educators—so we wanted to provide a tool that not only harnessed the power of modern technology, but also gave educators some of the tools and experience they need to use those tools on their own.
What’s Next?
You can try Ribbon’s Email Generator for yourself—it’s free and you don’t need to set up an account.
The technology behind the Email Generator is also being integrated within Ribbon’s Student Success tools. Imagine the same great emails but with even more personalized, real-time data
Imagine being able to easily access real-time information about which learners are at-risk, knowing what classes or assignments those learners are missing, and then being able to personalize and send a message to that student based on their data—all with a single click. How much time would that save you each week? If you’re like most of us, we’re guessing it’s a lot.
In the meantime, give the free Email Generator a try or demo our full product to see how we can help your team streamline processes and improve student retention.