Journey Mapping With Emotions — A Team Activity for Enrollment Directors

I've been thinking about example activities an enrollment director could run to help their team practice AI skills and produce insights they can use right now.

Here's one idea that does both.

From my background in software product management, I know the power of user journeys — especially when you map the emotions people feel at each step. In tech, this reveals where we build connections… and where we lose them.

It's not something I see used in schools often, yet families applying to schools are on one of the most emotionally charged journeys they'll ever take for their child.

So here is a team-driven activity for admission season planning:

1️⃣ Gather a diverse group — Admission, MarCom, Head of School, teachers, parent tour guides - anyone with insight into a family's admission experience. Make sure everyone has access to ChatGPT or another LLM.

2️⃣ Research the concept of journey mapping together using AI

Start by explaining the outcome and goal of the activity:

Goal: Build AI skills while finding ways to make our admission journey more trust-building and less anxiety-filled for families.

Then give everyone this starter prompt example:

"Explain what a user journey map with emotions is, give examples of the family journey from the school admission process, and suggest a simple framework I could use to build journey maps."

Have everyone share what they are learning and continue to iterate with ChatGPT until everyone agrees on a common mapping framework.

3️⃣ Build the journeys — As a group, brainstorm relevant journeys for your school and admission process. ADD CONTEXT for ChatGPT by asking it to review artifacts you have that speak to your family's journey (website, anonymized parent feedback, etc.).

Then assign each person a family journey to document independently using the agreed-upon framework and iterative conversations with ChatGPT.

Bonus ideas: Do you have different AI comfort levels within your group? Perfect.

• Your AI guru can vibe-code a quick app to document and color-code journeys.

• Your AI creative can use AI to narrate a parent's experience as an illustrated story for discussion.

4️⃣ Turn insights into action — Bring the group together to present each journey, discuss the stress points and "red flag" moments that emerged, and brainstorm practical ways to improve those touchpoints. Record the audio for each discussion, then use AI to manage identified action items, task lists, owners, and deadlines.

Result?

Your team gets hands-on AI practice and concrete steps to make the admission experience more supportive, human, and mission-aligned.