NSAD achieved remarkable enrollment growth during a year that should have contracted.
The New School of Architecture + Design (NSAD), a private design-focused institution in San Diego, entered 2026 under significant enrollment pressure as the enrollment team was losing headcount. The team was on track to be cut by more than 65%, from fully staffed to effectively one-and-a-half FTE.
In mid-December 2025, NSAD's Director of Enrollment, Vinh Tu, deployed Risely's agents to close the capacity gap created by these compounding headwinds. The platform went live on January 20, 2026, becoming the team's primary operating surface for enrollment outreach. The thesis was simple: if a shrinking enrollment team could be augmented with agents that triaged leads, drafted personalized outreach, logged every interaction, and surfaced the next-best action, NSAD could protect its pipeline without hiring staff it could not afford.
Net enrollments
Application completions
More documented interactions
After launch, the team was sending personalized, human-reviewed outreach at a pace the prior workflow could not approach, documenting nearly every lead conversation, and closing applications materially faster. Personalized emails sent rose +2,186% year over year and documented interactions rose +5,127%, run by a team a fraction of its former size.
A specialized institution under compounding pressure.
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 were responsible for the full funnel, inbound response, purchased-lead follow-up, application shepherding, admitted-student conversion, and withdrawal prevention. Then two pressures hit simultaneously.
Two simultaneous headwinds
Staffing contraction
Budget cuts reduced approved headcount from six to five. Two team members departed. The operating team became effectively 1.5 FTE, with a single specialist managing a full book of active students.
Fragmented workflow tooling
The existing CRM captured data but did not drive the workflow. Documentation was inconsistent, and the institution recorded only 5 interaction notes in the comparable pre-launch window.
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, 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
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.
13–29 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. The team has 56× more documented prospect interactions.
- 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 interaction
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
Net enrollments up 248% with only 1.5 FTE.
The enrollment team was cut by roughly 70%, from fully staffed to an effective 1.5 FTE. Output rose sharply, and net enrollments grew 248%. The smaller team, working alongside Risely's agents, outperformed the larger team that preceded it on every operational measure that mattered.
Personalized emails sent
Phone calls made
Close velocity
Withdrawals since launch
As agents took over drafting, outreach volume climbed sharply, run by a team a fraction of its former size. Applied across a full enrollment year, the team projects a multi-million-dollar lifetime-tuition impact attributable to the partnership.
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