Over 100 stories in three months, and not a single fire drill.

Today, when a WGU executive is heading into rural Utah and needs a success story from that exact corner of the map, Robert Sullivan doesn't flinch. He looks at the library. As the Sr. Director of Alumni Engagement at Western Governors University, Robert leads a department responsible for connecting nearly 450,000 alumni to jobs, to current students, and to the promise of what their education could make possible. And capturing the stories of those alumni sits, as he puts it, right at the center of it all.

That confidence is new. Not long ago, every request for a story set off a scramble. WGU's alumni team knew their people well, but they were serving a community approaching half a million, and no one can hold that in their head.

"Everyone has a story, and those stories help others," Robert says. The challenge was never a shortage of stories worth telling. It was finding them, fast, when someone needed one.

The requests came from every direction. Marketing needed stories for campaigns and commercial shoots. Comms needed them for PR pieces and specific state legislators. Executives on the road wanted graduate success stories to share wherever they landed. The appetite was constant, and Robert's team was expected to feed it.

"The demand is great, and the supply was not keeping up with that demand," Robert explains. That gap, he says, was really what had to change.

Without a system, the work ran on memory and relationships. Who had they worked with lately? Who was an award winner? Who did they know in that state? There was no database, no library, no place where a story could live and be found.

The real cost wasn't just time. It was the pressure of it. A provost would need rural student stories by tomorrow, and the whole team would start racking their brains. "As opposed to everyone start racking their brain and, you know, there's a fire to be put out," he says, describing the old reflex. The team wanted to deliver, because supporting the university with exactly that knowledge is why the department exists. But memory was never going to keep pace with the mission.

Robert had already narrowed the real problem down. It wasn't collecting stories, he knew plenty of ways to do that, from forms to emails. The hard part was making stories findable and usable by anyone who needed them, not just the person who happened to remember them.

His earlier attempt had been a public blog. It was helpful and visible, but it was only the polished end product. Before anything reached that page, someone had to interview, take notes, gather photos, write, edit, and publish. Nothing lived in between the raw conversation and the finished piece.

Then he saw Proofolio. "The first time I saw it, I was like, 'This will work,'" Robert says. What tipped it was the content library, and how it turned every interview into ready material.

Like any leader eyeing new software, Robert had a hesitation. His concern was the setup. How much time would this pull from his team? Would they have to reinvent their processes?

"It didn't stop me because Proofolio works out of the box," he says. What outweighed the worry was seeing the full solution in action. "The content library exists immediately after the interview, and all I have to do is share the link."

Still, he wanted proof before going all in. "At first it was like, 'Is this really gonna work?' So let's try a few people out that we know," Robert recalls. He wanted honest people who would give him real feedback. And it kept working.

One early interview stayed with him. The alumnus opened up about losing their mother right as their studies began. He had another quiet worry too, whether the finished story would stay true to the person. It did. "Will AI ever embellish or get a fact wrong? And it doesn't," he says. That first story was well-written and represented the graduate well.

The change shows up most clearly in what the team can now deliver. Those first stories went everywhere at once. "They get published to our website. They get shared with executives," Robert says. The team even launched a new monthly workflow, notifying specific people about the top two to three stories they might use in their speeches. Stories now flow internally, externally, and onto the website, often shared as anecdotes of "check out what we heard this week."

For Robert, the biggest shift is delivering on the department's core promise. When the provost went to rural Utah and asked for success stories of students from that region, the team could simply share what they had, "without having to rack our brains or fire drill it."

And the scale is real. "It's only been about three months that we're actually all in collecting them, and we have over 100 stories that we're able to share throughout the university," Robert says. Compare that to the old pace: "Before, I think manually you could do, like, two to four stories a month, and that would be with someone using a good chunk of their time."

He points to hours saved as the truest measure, and to a simpler bottom line: "We can now fulfill all requests." Had they kept going the old way, he says, they couldn't have collected nearly as many stories, couldn't fill the blog regularly, and might have had to add headcount to keep up. Instead, the tables have turned. Now Robert walks into the marketing and comms teams, whose job is content, and shows them what alumni engagement is producing on its own. "They're like, 'Yeah, I want those stories. Share all of them with me.'"

Robert doesn't keep this to himself. "I share this with everybody," he says. "In every department meeting that I'm with somebody else, I'm like, 'Hey, by the way, have you seen this thing that we're doing?'" The reaction is consistent: "Everybody looks at it and says, 'Oh, wow, I've never seen anything like that before.'"

His message to peers in a field he calls old and, for a long time, stale, is that a relationship business and technology aren't at odds. "We feel deeply that relationship part of it, and we think technology will get in the way," he says. But it won't, he insists.

Your customers already decided. Get it on the record.