Presets

Mainstay offers several preset personalities for you to choose from. (When a preset is selected, the AI prompt will automatically pull your bot's name from the General Settings page.)

Post-Secondary Pathways Guide
- Intended Audience: High school students
- Designed to: Provide a structured, encouraging presence that helps learners move from uncertainty to clear next steps. In situations involving procedures and deadlines (e.g. completing FAFSA, college applications), the bot will lead, narrowing ambiguity to support steady progress.
- Learners leave with: Clear next actions and forward momentum
- Testing insight: strong in overwhelm, competing priorities, and early-stage planning.

Near Peer Advisor
- Intended Audience: Traditional college students
- Designed to: Be a collaborative thought partner – slightly ahead in the journey – who thinks with the learner rather than defaulting to directing them. Offers options, reflective questions, and clear steps when appropriate (e.g. registering for classes, completing the FAFSA), while preserving autonomy.
- Learners leave with: Encouragement, options, and clarity on potential next steps.
- Testing insight: Effective in uncertainty and identity development; balances guidance with autonomy.

Adult Learner Knowledgeable Partner
- Intended Audience: Adult & non traditional learners
- Designed to: Be a consultative resource – respectful, steady, and informed. Centers autonomy, surfaces tradeoffs, and frames decisions around long-term implications and practical outcomes.
- Learners leave with: Confidence in informed decisions and a clear understanding of options
- Testing insight: Strong in high-stakes, risk-oriented decisions and balancing life responsibilities

Legacy Agent
- This preset is effectively the same as the prompt in use prior to Bot Personality Controls. This is very neutral, intended to respond to a variety of questions coming from a variety of learners.

You can then click Customize to unlock the checkboxes and other settings, using this preset as a template for something unique to your institution. Alternately, you can select Custom from the Personality menu to configure your own bot personality from a blank slate.

Configuration

The custom personality form guides you through the process of building out an AI prompt. Behind the scenes, your selections here map to instructions that get included whenever the AI is responding to a learner's question or offering a suggested response to your staff. (All of the preset personalities are similarly built using this structure.)

Name: The name of your bot. (Autofills based on the bot's name in General Settings, although you can override that here.)
Traits: Select one or more personality traits for your bot. Each of these maps to a set of instructions that affects your bot's behavior.
Tone: Select one or more tones for your bot. Each of these maps to a set of instructions that affects how your bot's messages sound.
AI Agent: Describe your bot in a few sentences, including its overall purpose and focus. If your bot is a character, such as a school mascot, provide that information here.
Interaction Mode: Select the primary action and driving force for your bot's communication.
Recipients: Describe your learners in a few sentences. This allows the bot to adjust its messaging approach and voice to better relate to the intended recipients.
Message Length: Select the desired length of bot responses.
Punctuation: Indicate the level of formality conveyed through punctuation (such as not ending a sentence with a period).
Links: Choose if the bot should include links in its answers or not.
Emoji Usage: Decide whether the bot should include emojis in its responses, and how many on average.
Special Instructions: This is an open-ended, catch-all text box for institution-specific rules and policies, plus guidance for handling situations that may come up.

Special Instructions

Introduction to Special Instructions

Special Instructions is a tool that helps you give guidance to your bot as you allow it to take on more responsibilities with generative AI features while still providing opportunities for humans to stay in the loop. These instructions serve as rules and policies as well as guidelines for handling certain situations that may come up in conversations between the bot and your learners.

There are a few ways you can leverage Special Instructions – there may be topics you’d prefer a human to handle instead of your bot, you may want the bot to include links to resources, or to instruct a learner to connect with a particular office or department in your organization or institution. Adding Special Instructions will inform your bot on how to manage each of these different situations, encouraging learners to connect with humans when appropriate or at crucial times.

Although Special Instructions are optional, they allow you to have more control about what and how your bot interacts with your learners. Leveraging this tool will help you to refine your bot’s performance and ensure your learners are met where they are and receive the help they need.

Best Practices

Setting up your Special Instructions can be done fairly easily by following these best practices.

In general, a Special Instruction works best when each item is phrased as an “If [situation], then [behavior]” sentence. Here are some examples:
- "If a student wants to schedule an appointment, then direct them to their advisor and provide a calendar link, but DO NOT offer to actually schedule events on their behalf."
- "If a student is interested in learning more about a particular program, then provide them with a link to the course catalog so they can explore further."
You can also provide DO NOT instructions to the bot for topics you prefer the bot to avoid. When using this approach, it’s important to always pair your DO NOT instruction with an alternative action using this format: “DO NOT [action], instead [preferred course of action].” Pairing your instruction with an alternative helps ensure the bot has clear guidance on what to do next, rather than just what to avoid. Here are some examples:
- "DO NOT answer any questions around financial aid, instead direct the student to the financial aid office by providing the office's contact information."
- "DO NOT provide any answers to homework or test questions, instead direct the learner to appropriate resources to help the student learn on their own."
Special Instructions can also be used to guide your bot on terminology and language preferences specific to your institution. For example:
- “Always refer to new students as ‘first year students,’ never as freshmen” or “Refer to our advising tool as ‘My Academic Plan,’ not ‘the student portal.’”

Examples of How Partners are Using Special Instructions

Here are a variety of examples around how partners are using Special Instructions currently.

If a learner asks about enrolling, cost, financial assistance, or programs, answer their questions and then say “if you have follow up questions are ready to take the next step, just text #rep to connect with your enrollment representative.”
If a learner wants to connect with their coach, then tell them to use the #coach command to have their coach reach out to them
If a learner asks a vague question, then ask clarifying questions to learn the context before answering the question
If a learner asks a question that could apply to both FAFSA and admissions, then ask which they mean before answering

These are just a few ways partners are currently using Special Instructions. If you are adding Special Instructions and feel unsure or would like additional support, reach out to your Partnership Director or Partnership Operations Manager for more guidance.

Samples

After you select a preset or save a custom configuration, the bot will generate responses to a handful of sample messages. This provides instant feedback on your bot's personality - a quick way to see the impact of your changes. For more in-depth testing, such as simulating the experience of specific learners or specific Audiences, use Test the Bot.