Overview
Edtech product teams and education program leaders face steep barriers to scale–from tight budgets and shifting priorities to complex decision-making. Even the most mission-driven, evidence-based solutions struggle to gain traction. Yet school systems remain eager for tools that improve teaching and learning. The challenge is not just proving impact, but connecting to what educators value–building trust and momentum in uncertain conditions.
To help address this, TLA partnered with Clever Lucy, a strategic marketing agency known for its expertise in education, branding, integrated marketing, and creative content development, to explore storytelling as more than just branding. When used well, storytelling highlights real-world impact, lifts community voices, and fuels growth that’s both meaningful and scalable.
Understanding Storytelling
In education, storytelling is about sharing authentic, grounded narratives that explain what a solution does–and why it matters. It links data to lived experience and helps people make sense of innovation. Far from being just a comms function, storytelling should be a shared effort. The strongest stories center educators and students, making change feel real and relevant.
Storytelling is most powerful when it meets audiences where they already are. This can include:
Conference sessions and keynotes
Blog posts, op-eds, and thought leadership
Research briefs and case studies
Social media and newsletters
School visits and demo days
Across channels, the goal is the same: build bridges from vision to action.
Why it Matters for Scaling
In cautious systems, stories help innovations break through. Clear, authentic narratives build shared understanding, drive demand, and unite stakeholders–which in turn strengthens engagement, ensures accountability, and drives sustainable impact.
Storytelling can:
Highlight results in ways that are understandable and emotionally resonant
Build credibility through stories of practitioner success and student growth
Foster community by elevating the voices of those closest to the work
Accelerate adoption by showing—not just telling—how innovation happens
When aligned with strategy, storytelling becomes a core lever for scale.
Approach
Organizations interested in utilizing storytelling can take the following steps:
Step 1: Understand your audience and their pain points. Listen to what your team is hearing from key audiences and what matters to them. These conversions will help you identify current pain points and how you can best shift your story to highlight your key market solution. Consider:
- How have conversations changed in light of education market shifts?
- What have you been hearing when selling or pitching new customers?
- What are customers telling you about your competition?
- Are you hearing new challenges through customer feedback?
Step 2: Define your overarching story via value propositions. Value propositions express the key benefits or unique advantages that make your product or service appealing to customers. A strong value proposition clearly explains why your offering is valuable, how it solves a problem, and why it's better than alternatives. View the Value Proposition Worksheet to help guide your proposition development.
To make the leap from value to story, start with your audience’s problem, then connect your solution to a specific moment, person, or outcome that brings your promise to life. For example, you could build on the benefit of “reducing teacher workload” by weaving in a real-world story from a teacher who used your solution to improve student outcomes. Examples:
Value prop: “We provide innovative solutions for educators to reduce teacher planning time.”
Story: “We help schools reduce teacher workload by automating lesson planning and grading to let teachers focus on what they do best - teach!Value prop: “Create personalized reading passages for students quickly.”
Story: “Increase reading comprehension and build a love for reading with tailored stories crafted for every student in your classroom with one-click of a button.”
Step 3: Identify the right channels to tell your story. Before you develop messaging, start by identifying where your audiences spend their time. Different channels call for different storytelling formats and levels of detail. Understanding where your audience segments spend their time will help determine which stories to share and how to tell them. For example, classroom teachers more commonly connect over social media like Facebook, while administrators tend to utilize networking platforms like LinkedIn more.
It is also essential to understand how your audience is utilizing those channels. Storytelling through social media should look and sound different than engaging audiences at a conference or communicating via a published op-ed. The more you align your story with a channel’s purpose, the more likely your message will resonate with its target audience. Connecting on TikTok should be fun and lighthearted, while LinkedIn typically has a more academic culture centering thought leadership ideas.
Identify which segments of your audience interact with each of these channels so you know what to prioritize when crafting stories:
Educational websites
Social media
Print and digital communications
Conferences
Pitches
Sales Collateral (ie, product brochures, comparison guides, case studies, pricing guides, etc.)
Step 4: Develop a messaging guide for consistent and impactful storytelling. Once you’ve identified the best channels for your audience, craft messaging for each context with a messaging guide. This ensures that every team member tells the same core story, tailored to each channel and audience. It translates your value propositions into specific messages, ensuring clear differences between your formats (e.g., social media posts versus pitch decks), while keeping both grounded in the same overarching, strategic narrative. This consistency builds trust with your audience while still personalizing the stories they receive to their specific pain points.
A messaging guide gives your team a solid foundation to work from. Instead of starting from scratch every time the market shifts, you can quickly adapt your messaging to reflect new trends, challenges, or opportunities, while staying true to your core brand. It keeps communications focused, strategic, and aligned across departments. Regardless of the role a team member plays, everyone can turn to it for guidance on how to deliver a consistent, credible message that meets your target audience where they are (on the right channel, in the right tone, at the right time).
Whether you’re developing a messaging guide for the first time or adapting it to meet emerging customer needs, an outside perspective can be extremely valuable. Whether it’s a consultant, partner, or expert like Clever Lucy, fresh eyes bring clarity and objectivity to strengthen your storytelling in a crowded market.
