More leads than hands.
The NewSchool of Architecture + Design (NSAD) is a private, design-focused institution in San Diego. Its lead pool was growing far faster than its enrollment team. In the same six weeks a year apart, new leads grew more than 12x.
Director of Enrollment Vinh Tu brought in Risely, and the platform became the operating system for the team's daily work. Every weekday, Risely's agents score every lead, brief the specialist before each conversation, draft the outreach, analyze the calls, and keep the CRM current. A specialist reviews every send.
Capacity per specialist
More personal emails
More documented interactions
Each student now takes a specialist about 3 minutes instead of 29. The pace has held since launch, and more than half of Risely's drafts now go out without a single edit.
A specialized institution with a full book of students.
NSAD is a specialized private institution offering professional degrees in architecture, construction management, and design. Its admissions funnel is dominated by two lead types: purchased leads, and organic inquiries via website forms, applications, referrals, and walk-ins.
Before the partnership, NSAD's enrollment function was run by a specialist team reporting to Vinh Tu. Specialists owned the full funnel: inbound response, purchased-lead follow-up, application shepherding, admitted-student conversion, and withdrawal prevention. Two pressures made that work hard to keep up with.
Two pressures on the team
More leads than hands
The lead pool grew far faster than the team could work it one email at a time.
Fragmented tools
The existing CRM captured data, but it did not drive the work. Documentation varied from one specialist to the next.
We all appreciate that Risely will make suggestions outside of the workflow, which actually seems to be more productive than our existing CRM in regard to frequency of engagement with leads.
Maia Wakefield
Assistant Director of Enrollment, NSAD
The team shaped the agents.
Agents that run enrollment outreach have to know how NSAD runs enrollment outreach. In the weeks before and after launch, both the enrollment specialists and leadership worked directly with Risely to encode their playbook into the platform: priorities, tone, escalation rules, and edge cases.
Stakeholder
Role in the Partnership
Vinh Tu
Director of Enrollment
Executive sponsor; decisioned the platform rollout to the enrollment team.
NSAD Enrollment Specialists
Daily operators; provided the feedback that drove near-weekly feature iteration.
Risely's Forward Deployed Engineers
Onboarding, co-building, weekly working sessions, feature shipping against live feedback.
One of our specialists was not thrilled when Risely first came out. Now he would be the first to tell you he was wrong. He swallowed his pride and realized that Risely is exactly what he needed to balance the work. He would be your number one proponent of Risely now. He gets it.
Vinh Tu
Director of Enrollment, NSAD
The platform shipped against live feedback on a weekly cadence. Specialists raised a friction point; Risely's engineers shipped a fix or a new capability within days. Usage surfaced friction, friction drove feature requests, features shipped, and new usage compounded.
8 Capabilities Shipped in 6 Weeks
Every feature was defined in close collaboration with Maia, Vinh, and the full NSAD enrollment team, and built to solve the real daily friction the team hit in their work.
Triage Agent
Scores and prioritizes every lead daily. Surfaces highest-value first.
Task Flow
Guided outreach queue. One screen for email, call, and SMS.
Outreach Agent
Personalized drafts from lead data. Human reviews every send.
Briefing Assistant
Instant AI Q&A, profile, milestones, Outlook threads, call history.
VP Dashboard
Real-time pipeline, funnel, run rates, and specialist activity.
Bulk Outreach
Campaign-style sends to filtered segments.
Call & SMS Logging
One click logs the call with notes and syncs it to the CRM.
Lead Closure
Structured close-out with reason tracking.
The application triage is really, really strong. We love it.
Maia Wakefield
Assistant Director of Enrollment, NSAD
Seven jobs Risely's agents run every day.
Risely's agents handle the operational work of enrollment, and the specialists spend their time with students.
The job
What the agents do
Measured
Prioritize
Score every lead in the pipeline each weekday and put the hottest first.
80.5% of effort on the hottest leads
Prepare
Brief the specialist on the student's history before each conversation.
1.6 briefings per student action
Reach
Draft each email from the student's own record for a specialist to review.
22x more personal emails
Listen
Transcribe and analyze the team's calls.
From 30% of calls to 90%
Record
Log every interaction back to the CRM in one click.
52x more documented interactions
Learn
Improve the drafts as the team edits them.
Drafts sent unedited rose from 13% to 58%
Run the day
Move the team's daily task list into one guided queue.
93.7% of tasks moved in 30 days
The same work, collapsed into one screen.
Prioritizing, researching, writing, and logging now happen inside a single interface, guided by Risely's enrollment agents at every step. The cognitive load is gone. The volume has increased.
Before Risely · A Specialist's Day
Manual navigation across multiple disconnected tools, with no intelligence guiding where to focus first.
- 1Open CRMUnsorted task list, no prioritization. No way to know which lead deserved attention first.
- 2Pick a lead manuallyThere was no scoring and no context. Selecting who to contact was pure guesswork.
- 3Click through multiple tabsUnderstanding a student required opening profile, email, notes, and history across separate screens.
- 4Compose from scratch, send via OutlookEvery email written manually. No templates, no AI assistance, no personalization at scale.
- 5Return to CRM, log manuallyMark task done, write note by hand.
29 min
Time per student
15–20
Max contacts / day
After Risely · A Specialist's Day
The same work now happens inside a single screen, guided by agents at every step. The cognitive load is gone, and documented prospect interactions are up 52x.
- 1Open Risely, one tab, one screenNo context switching. Everything needed to run the day is right here.
- 2Triage Agent has scored every lead overnightThe system already knows who matters most. The specialist just works the list.
- 3Click a lead, the Briefing Agent shows the full story instantlyProfile, milestones, email history, call notes, summarized in seconds.
- 4Outreach Agent generates a personalized email draftEvery draft comes from the student's actual data. Nothing is templated.
- 5Review the draft. One click sends it and one click logs the call.Logging is a single click, synced back to the CRM automatically.
3 min
Time per student
103
Actions / day
I laughed with my team after. We were all just dead silent when the Risely team was showing us this because it just blew our minds.
Maia Wakefield
Assistant Director of Enrollment, NSAD
A fast start, and the pace held.
Compared with the same six weeks a year earlier, the team's output jumped on every measure it tracked. The gains were not a spike. Since launch, the team has kept up 11x its old pace of personal outreach.
Personal emails
Outreach tasks
Phone calls
Unique leads contacted
The work also got better as it scaled. Call analysis grew from 30% of the team's calls to 90%. Over the same stretch, the share of Risely's drafts sent without a single edit rose from 13% to 58%, because the drafts had learned the team's voice.
Risely has definitely delivered.
Vinh Tu
Director of Enrollment, NSAD
We demoed it for the leadership team and the first question was, “Can I have it for my department?”
Vinh Tu
Director of Enrollment, NSAD
Comparisons use NewSchool's CRM records for the same calendar weeks a year apart, and Risely's activity logs since launch.