National Student Clearinghouse: Welcome Video

Freelance project. External client. One video that had to do the work of an entire orientation.

Freelance Client  |  External-Facing Content  |  Higher Education Audience  |  Embedded in Client Onboarding Email

About this project

This was not an internal training build. The National Student Clearinghouse needed a way to orient brand new school clients to two interconnected services before implementation even began. The welcome email was the only touchpoint. The video had to carry the full load.

Writing for an external audience is a different discipline than writing for employees. The tone has to build confidence without being condescending. The structure has to follow the user's workflow, not the product feature list. And it has to be short enough that someone actually watches it.

  • The National Student Clearinghouse offers a service that allows admissions staff to order transcripts on behalf of applicants, but onboarding new school clients involved minimal human touchpoints by design. There was no resource that quickly oriented new clients to how the service worked before implementation began. New clients were receiving a welcome email with documentation but nothing that pulled the full picture together in a digestible, engaging way.

  • A short welcome video script designed to be embedded directly in the client onboarding email. The video introduces two interconnected services, Third-Party Ordering for Admissions and ETX Plus, and walks new clients through how they fit together across the full admissions workflow. The script was written to be clear, jargon-light, and structured around the client's actual day-to-day process rather than a feature list. It covers ordering, monitoring, transcript delivery, implementation setup, and ongoing support resources in a logical sequence that mirrors how a new user would actually encounter the system.

  • This was external-facing client communication, not internal training. The audience was admissions staff at colleges and universities who needed to get up to speed quickly with minimal friction. The script had to do a lot of work in a short amount of time: introduce two products, explain a workflow, set implementation expectations, and leave the viewer feeling confident rather than overwhelmed.

  • A polished, production-ready script delivered for client use in the National Student Clearinghouse welcome email sequence.

Watch the final deliverable

Good instructional content works whether the audience is a new employee or a new client.

The principles are the same:

know who you're writing for, follow their logic, and get out of the way.