The arrival of generative AI is transforming the content marketing industry. Chatbots allow creators to achieve new levels of efficiency, but they still require careful handling to avoid bad results. They also raise important ethical questions.
A recent project for Growing Inland Achievement, a nonprofit, gave Red Mallard a fresh opportunity to explore strategies for leveraging the efficiency of AI without compromising on the accuracy and integrity of the final content.
About Growing Inland Achievement
Growing Inland Achievement is a nonprofit dedicated to fostering educational and economic equity within California’s Inland Empire. The organization builds networks across all sectors of society, including educational institutions, government, business, and the nonprofit community to support learning and career opportunities for students of all ages.
Click here to visit the Growing Inland Achievement website.
The Challenge: Quality, Speed and Volume
Growing Inland Achievement engaged Red Mallard to support the buildout of one of their specialized websites, Inland Empire Success. The IESuccess site provides financial aid information for college-bound students.
The Inland Empire lags significantly behind the rest of California in educational achievement. Around 20% of residents hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to state and national averages of about 37%. Growing Inland Achievement uses the IESuccess platform to lower the financial barriers that prevent many Inland Empire residents from pursuing higher education.
In 2024 the federal government rolled out a new process for its Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. The rollout was plagued by major delays and technical problems that have made accessing financial aid much more difficult.
As part of a broad effort to assist students impacted by the FAFSA issues, Growing Inland Achievement received a grant to expand its outreach to Inland Empire residents who need help with financial aid. One component of the new outreach effort was an expanded library of resources to help students navigate the complex FAFSA process.
The deadline for filing the FAFSA was quickly approaching, making timing a crucial factor in this project. Volume was also important: IESuccess needed a high word count on its website to ensure students could find it online. It was essential that the information also be accurate and useful.
Growing Inland Achievement asked Red Mallard to produce thirty articles in one week. Each article needed to be between 750 and 1,000 words in length, covering topics helpful to anyone interested in going to college. In addition to information about financial aid, they needed articles on adjacent topics to optimize the IESuccess website’s usefulness. Along with providing a suite of authoritative sources, Growing Inland Achievement invited us to use AI to assist the drafting process.
AI Opens Up New Possibilities
The traditional formula holds that in any endeavor one must choose two of three goals: speed, volume, and quality. Red Mallard’s approach for IESuccess was to achieve all three goals by establishing a consistent process for our professional writing and editorial team to follow.
Artificial intelligence only simulates expertise. It leaves out important information and, worse, makes up ideas. To eliminate these risks, all content would be reviewed by experts at Growing Inland Achievement to verify that our work was accurate and complete.
To meet the client’s deadline, Red Mallard worked with several professional writers. Most of them had never used AI to assist their work. Our main tools were ChatGPT and Google Gemini. Red Mallard favors Gemini as a research assistant, while ChatGPT tends to provide stronger draft text. The client provided a detailed topic list for Red Mallard to work with.
We asked our writers to follow these steps to complete their drafts:
Step 1: Plan
Creating outlines is one of AI’s great strengths. Writers were asked to prompt the AI to propose an outline for an article of approximately 1,000 words directed at an audience of first-generation college-bound students who are assumed to know little about college or financial aid. At this stage, the writer’s job is to review the outline for logical consistency and topical completeness.
Step 2: Curate
Following the edited outline, the writer prompts the AI to generate concise paragraphs on each topic. The goal is to keep the AI narrowly focused to avoid its tendency to wander from the main point. Working in small chunks also allows the writer to regenerate responses until a useful output is achieved.
Step 3: Edit
With the initial content draft in place, the writer moves on to scrub out the worst cases of what the world is coming to recognize as AI style. AI approaches writing like a talented college freshman who is primarily worried about reaching a target word count. It tends to use empty phrases and cliches. This is also the stage for gluing the draft’s pieces together with strong transitions.
Step 4: Write
The writer’s skill now turns to preparing a strong introduction and conclusion. This is also the time to double check that the draft uses every opportunity to add the client’s unique perspective to specific ideas. For example, if the client’s website has additional information about a topic, the writer adds a sentence directing the reader to a link.
Insights into AI-assisted Content Creation
Red Mallard delivered the full slate of articles on time and seamlessly collaborated with the team at Growing Inland Achievement to address a few areas where their expert insights added value to the articles.
This project highlighted the important ways in which creative professionals are still essential in developing content:
- Editors are more valuable than ever. As writers turned in drafts, Red Mallard’s editors reviewed them to provide an additional layer of quality control. Even the best writers tend to miss opportunities to improve the AI’s output. A professional editor’s specialized training brings out the full value of AI as a content creation tool. Along with correcting the AI’s bad writing habits, a skilled editor adds a necessary pinch of style.
- The writer’s skill is still central. The editors were struck by how strongly each writer’s individual style came through in the drafts, despite following the same AI-assisted process. The best writers produced the best drafts. Put another way, AI is unlikely to make a mediocre writer into a professional.
- Speed gains open new possibilities. While each writer worked at a slightly different pace, the consensus was that using AI greatly improved their speed in the planning and research stages, allowing for more time to refine drafts or expand the overall word count without sacrificing quality.
Contributing to a Brighter Future
Red Mallard is proud to have contributed to the important work Growing Inland Achievement does to support the educational aspirations of Inland Empire residents. The project afforded us an opportunity to explore strategies for quickly producing high quality content in high volumes. In the new era of AI-driven content development, we’ve shown how informative, useful content can be built without accepting unnecessary compromises.
Do you need lots of content right away? Red Mallard can help. Call us at (714) 907-1517 or visit us at www.redmallard.com.
