Audit your content: are you telling stories or just listing values?
Most university content communicates what an institution believes rather than what actually happened to real people. As John Azoni puts it, "A story is something that happened to somebody." If your about page, social posts, or videos describe your mission and values without a specific person, a specific moment, and a specific outcome, you're not storytelling yet. Run that test against your last five content pieces before your next production decision.
Use the "side door" approach to build brand connection without triggering ad avoidance
Audiences are conditioned to scroll past direct institutional pitches. Azoni's side door strategy leads with a compelling human story, his example being a 10-minute mini-documentary Boston University made about a campus custodian with 27 years of service. Viewers get emotionally invested in the person before they realize they're watching branded content. That emotional investment is what makes the brand stick. Start by identifying one person on or connected to your campus whose story you'd want to watch, with no promotional agenda attached.
Budget doesn't determine video quality, story does
Azoni is direct about this: "If you're gonna get a boring video, it doesn't matter if it's a $10,000 camera or an iPhone." Felician University's most-viewed TikTok cost nothing. It was filmed on a smartphone and followed a student with special needs sharing his ambitions. It went viral not because of production value but because the story was genuine. Smaller institutions should stop waiting for budget approval to start producing content.
Represent only the diversity that actually exists on your campus
Audiences recognize manufactured representation immediately. Azoni's advice is blunt: don't try to act like you're not what you are. And the definition of diversity worth showing goes well beyond race. Disability, age, non-traditional life circumstances, and background are all valid and often underrepresented. Authentic diversity storytelling builds trust; forced diversity optics erode it. Before your next shoot, ask honestly whether the people you're featuring reflect the campus experience students will actually have.
Build storytelling into your annual budget as a recurring line item, not a campaign
The stop-start production cycle is expensive and ineffective. Azoni's model treats storytelling as a continuous marketing function: batch-film a year's worth of content in focused production days, then release one piece per month throughout the year. This approach keeps the brand present year-round, reduces per-unit production costs, and builds audience familiarity over time. If your institution only produces video content around enrollment season or special events, it's time to reframe the budget conversation internally.
Use Claude to map topics across multiple long-form interview transcripts in minutes
For a project with the University of Chicago Data Science Institute, Azoni uploaded eight alumni interview transcripts into Claude and had a full topic map in about 20 minutes. The same work manually would have taken hours. If you're managing multiple subject interviews for a content series, this workflow can dramatically speed up the planning phase and help you spot thematic gaps before filming starts. Azoni notes specifically that Claude handles long-form transcripts where other tools fall short.
Feed your planned interview questions into an AI tool before every shoot
Azoni describes this as having "a co-director that can help you just kind of see blind spots." Before filming, paste your question set into Claude and ask what you haven't thought to ask yet. The tool will surface angles, follow-up threads, and subject areas that didn't occur to you. It's a low-effort step that consistently improves interview depth, especially when you're covering complex or technical subject matter like alumni career outcomes or research initiatives.
