Fort Lewis College Marketing and Communications receives Elevate AI funding

With support from the AI Institute’s Elevate AI program, Fort Lewis College Marketing and Communications is launching a new project focused on institutional visibility, audience insight, and content development in support of student recruitment and strategic communications. Through the project, MarComm will evaluate how AI-enabled tools can be integrated into existing workflows and used in day-to-day work. 

For MarComm, the work is not about adopting new technology for its own sake. It is an opportunity to better understand how Fort Lewis Collegeis represented and discovered online, how search behavior and audience questions can shape content strategy, and how AI tools might support the everyday work of recruitment storytelling.  

“We wanted to pursue Elevate AI funding because it's such a fantastic opportunity for Fort Lewis College administrative staff to have funding support to be exploratory,” said Lizzie Kost, website content writer. 

That sense of possibility matters for a small team balancing strategy, storytelling, and service. The funding creates room to ask practicalquestions about the work itself: which tools are genuinely useful, where they strengthen existing workflows, and how they might help MarCommrespond more thoughtfully to the needs of prospective students and campus partners. 

Anna McBrayer, director of Marketing and Communications, said the support helps remove some of the obstacles that can make it harder for smaller teams to test new ideas.  

“It takes away some of those barriers so that we can just approach it with curiosity,” McBrayer said. 

That curiosity is rooted in some very practical questions. How is Fort Lewis College showing up online? What questions are prospective students and other audiences asking? And how can those insights lead to stronger content? For MarComm, the project offers a chance to explore those questions in ways that are both strategic and creative.

Kost said the team is also interested in what the process reveals about the work itself.  

“We're trying to understand the limits of new technology and how it relates to the work we do, how it can expand or detract from the quality of our work, how it can stretch the bottom line, how it can support professional development for our team, and also how it can inform campus best practices for content creation,” she said. 

For McBrayer, the value of the project extends beyond MarComm. If AI tools can help streamline workflows, they may also create new opportunities to support other departments and build a more cohesive, shared voice that strengthens how the College shows up and connects with its audiences.

“That's the opportunity. We want to be able to say, yes, we can help you with that,” she said. “It’s not just about capacity—it’s about helping campus partners align their efforts in a way that strengthens our shared story. We’re not just asking departments to approach things a certain way; we’re providing the strategy and support to help them do it well.”

As MarComm explores new ways to support its own work, the project may also help open broader campus conversations about how AI can be used thoughtfully, creatively, and in the service of stronger communication.

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