Whitepaper

Apr 15, 2026

How to Talk to AI: A Prompt Writing Guide for Arts and Culture Organisations

If you’re tried using an AI agent before now, you may be familiar with this scenario: you type a question, receive something back, and just think: that's not quite right. The output feels generic, or weirdly corporate, nothing like the way your organisation actually sounds!

AI tools work by predicting what word should come next, based on patterns in the text they were trained on. Give a vague prompt and you get the most average, most generic version of whatever you asked for. Give a detailed, well-structured prompt and you narrow the field, pointing AI towards the kind of output you actually want. This guide gives you three techniques to do exactly that.

Technique 1: Meta Prompts: Let AI Help You Write the Prompt

You don't need to know the perfect prompt before you begin. A meta prompt is when you describe your task to AI and ask it to help you construct the right prompt. The pattern is simple:

"How do I write a prompt so you [describe the outcome you want]? Do you have any questions?"

That final question is what makes this work. AI will come back with clarifying questions: who's the audience, what tone, how long, what to avoid. Answer those questions and you've built a detailed brief without having to design the prompt from scratch. If AI doesn't ask about format and structure, tell it: without that, you'll still get a wall of text.

This works particularly well for unfamiliar tasks. An education officer might ask: "How do I write a prompt so you create a structured report on our schools programme for our board of trustees? Do you have any questions?" A festival director dealing with a cancellation might ask: "How do I write a prompt to help me draft an email to ticket holders explaining that a headline act has pulled out? Do you have any questions?"

The first response is a starting point, not a finished product. Refine it. Two or three rounds usually gets you where you need to be. Meta prompts are ideal for complex or unfamiliar tasks where you don't yet know what the prompt needs. For routine tasks where you know what you want, RBSF is faster.

Technique 2: RBSF: A Scaffold for Every Prompt

RBSF stands for Role, Brief, Style, Format. It's a four-part structure that forces you to think clearly about what you want before you ask, and gives AI what it needs in the right order.

Role: give AI a specific job title. "An expert" tells it almost nothing. "A development officer at a regional theatre who writes funding applications" tells it exactly what knowledge to draw on.

Brief: the core of your request. State the task clearly, include context, constraints and what success looks like. Too much detail is better than too little.

Style: control how it sounds. "Professional" isn't specific enough. Use contrast: describe what you want and what to avoid. "Warm and straightforward, not a corporate communications department issuing a statement. No hedging language. Every sentence should carry meaning."

Format: specify the shape of the output. Length, sections, headings, what not to include. This saves significant editing time.

Here's a complete example →

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Technique 3: Example-Based Generation: Show AI What Good Looks Like

This is the most powerful technique. Instead of describing the style and format you want, you show AI by providing examples of your own successful previous output. AI learns the patterns, voice and structure from the examples and applies them to new information.

The process has four steps: give AI a role (keep it broad and functional here, let the examples set the tone), tell it what you want and why you're providing examples, provide the examples, then include the new raw information to process.

The prompt pattern is consistent: "Here's [existing good output]. Here's [new raw information]. Write the [desired output]."

This works across every function: here's last season's brochure introduction, write this season's.. Here's last quarter's board report, here are the updated figures, write the new one.

The examples do the heavy lifting, much of your Style and Format is already embedded in a high-quality example, and where the two conflict, the example wins.

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Remember

▸ Keep iterating: your first result is rarely the final one.

▸ Be the human in the loop: AI drafts, you decide.

▸ More detail beats less

▸ Show, don't just tell: use examples whenever you can.

▸And if you're unsure where to start, begin with a meta prompt and let AI ask the questions.

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This guide was developed by Ticketsolve in partnership with Brightbeam

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