Executive summary
As student loan provider NelNet expands its offerings, it needs a way for employees—and especially its documentation team—to boost productivity while staying on-brand and improving writing quality.
Enter Grammarly, NelNet’s built-in AI writing partner. By getting its documentation, grant writing, and IT administration teams to use Grammarly, NelNet not only achieved its goal of writing consistently and concisely across several channels but also saved its team significant time—about two days per month per employee. This investment yielded a remarkable ROI of 20.3x, making it a clear win for the company.
NelNet’s challenge: Scale content output and maintain brand consistency
According to Paige Stewart, a UX writer at Nelnet, her job is all about “turning confusion into clarity with in-app help content.”
Stewart and her lean team of remote writers create content that helps their customers navigate loans and financial situations in the education sector. They’re tasked with writing for various in-product modals, pop-ups, and messages about ever-evolving products and services. Plus, the fully remote, time-strapped team must ensure their content presents a united front and uses accurate, company-approved language.
Goal 1: Improve writing quality
NelNet’s first goal was to help all team members communicate better internally and with customers.
“The best writing help you can get is contextual and repeated feedback,” says Stewart, who was an adjunct professor before she made the leap into product design. “We love that Grammarly delivers guidance in-line.”
NelNet’s Grammarly analytics dashboard shows that teams are reducing writing errors and becoming more concise, clear communicators.
Goal 2: Stay on-brand and use company-approved language.
It can be challenging to maintain a consistent writing style across a remote team. But Grammarly’s team features, like style guides and Knowledge Share, can quickly get dispersed teams on the same page—and help them stay there even when products, services, and policies evolve.
In the case of NelNet, Stewart updates her team’s Knowledge Share with the correct names and information for new NelNet services, and instantly that guidance follows her team members wherever they write. Next time a writer creates content about the new service, they’re equipped with essential information at their fingertips, in-line. In turn, Paige’s team members can avoid context switching between where they’re writing and an unwieldy style guide or internal wiki.
Stewart loves that she can set brand-specific language standards and tone guidance not just for her team but also for her colleagues on the IT administration and grant writing teams, which have also adopted Grammarly into their workflow.
“The Knowledge Share and style guide features allow us to be very specific about the kinds of writing suggestions Grammarly serves up,” Stewart shares.
Using these team features means each written piece needs less editing for word choice, correctness, and brand tone.
Goal 3: Streamline writing workflows and work smarter.
NelNet employees also save time on repetitive tasks. NelNet reports that Grammarly saves each associate an average of three hours per week or about two days per month.
Stewart credits snippets, one of Grammarly’s team features, as the biggest time-saver when it comes to repetitive, daily writing tasks. Instead of typing the same thing over and over and potentially introducing errors, these message templates turn tedious, energy-sucking tasks into one-click productivity wins.
Goal 4: Accelerate output
Grammarly’s Generative AI helps NelNet adapt written information for a variety of formats. For instance, writers on Stewart’s team often prompt Grammarly to rewrite an existing article into a script format with a friendlier, more conversational tone. Instantly a lean writing team can turn company knowledge and documentation into understandable content for a variety of channels and purposes.
NelNet’s 5 favorite Grammarly features
- Contextual, real-time feedback upskills NelNet associates by providing feedback in line, wherever they work.
- The style guide, which follows writers wherever they type, coaches team members to use on-brand language and company terms, helping NelNet associates stay on-brand.
- Generative AI helps NelNet adapt written information for various formats. NelNet associates across grant writing, documentation, and IT teams save time by using Grammarly to generate email responses and draft project plans.
- Snippets streamline repetitive messages and help ensure consistency across the company.
- Knowledge share, which defines NelNet company terms and industry jargon, helps team members stay up-to-date on evolving product offerings, reduces confusion in written communication, and eases onboarding of new remote team members.
By integrating Grammarly into the team’s writing workflows, NelNet not only achieved its objectives of maintaining brand consistency and improving productivity but also realized substantial time savings for its associates.
Better yet—Stewart says Grammarly is a breeze to use regardless of technology or writing experience.
“Once everyone signed in, I didn’t really have to do anything else,” Stewart says, “The product just worked and everyone got the support they needed.”
