MidCoast Christian College had always run one-to-one tours. They were warm, relational, and often effective, but hard to scale, and every family got a slightly different tour: different messages, different routes, different tones, depending on who was leading. Leadership wanted a format that kept the personal connection, cut the administrative strain, and reflected the school’s new brand and story. The honest questions going in: would a group format keep the personal feel? Would families show up, stay engaged, and still feel seen?
The instincts around hospitality were already strong. What the tour didn’t have yet was a shared structure for how the story got told. It varied widely from one visit to the next, the before-and-after communication was heavy and manual, and the school’s own technology was sitting there ready to take some of that on. The story itself was strong; it just wasn’t reaching every family the same way each time.
Through a facilitated design process with the executive team, we mapped what parents needed to feel, know, and understand at each moment of the tour. That shaped a small group format built around story, rhythm, and clarity. We designed the flow, refined the narrative, and tied it into the language of the new website and the upcoming prospectus as we went. Digistorm Funnel picked up the essential communication automatically, which freed the staff to focus on the experience itself. Then the school launched its first small group tour, with a mix of anticipation and uncertainty. After years of personal tours, this was a significant operational shift.
The response was immediate. The tour booked out within a couple of weeks. The Principal and Deputy connected with prospective families in a way their schedules don’t usually allow, and stayed an extra hour after the session enjoying the conversation. One family decided to start straight away rather than wait for the new school year. The need-to-know communication ran automatically, so the admin load dropped compared to a standard one-to-one tour. And every moment of the tour lined up with the story on the website and in the prospectus.
The fear going in was that a shared structure would make the tours feel less personal. It did the opposite. Designing the tour around what parents need to feel, know, and understand made every visit more intentional, and gave each family a clearer sense of what came next.
The first small group tour booked out within a couple of weeks.
One family chose to start straight away rather than wait for the new school year.
Logistics ran automatically through Digistorm Funnel, dramatically reducing the admin work of one-to-one tours.
Orange Christian School’s executive team asked for a virtual tour. Instead of the usual static 360 images, we ran a tour design process and turned its output into a video script, delivering the tour video plus a header video and a bank of B-roll.
MCCC’s prospectus was storyboarded in the workshop as a low-fidelity prototype, mapped to the messaging strategy and the new website’s language, and built on the photography and graphic elements of the wider brand world.
