Great Enrollment Communications Takes Time. Here’s How Holy Family Found More of It.

Partner: Holy Family University
Product: AI Campaign Agent
Date: February 2026

“When enrollment marketing learned how to segment messages and personalize content, our practices changed.  That is history now.  This tool has opened a door to efficiently accessing hyper-personalized messages that are reflective of our mission and identity to always place the student first.  This is where I expected us to be 5 years from now, and I am thrilled that we are here today instead.” 

— Dr. Edward P. Wright, Vice President for Enrollment Management, Holy Family University

We’ve all been there: the better you are at your job, the busier you get. And the busier you get, the less time you have to do the parts of your job that really make a difference.

Christopher Jester is great at his job. As Holy Family University's Director of Enrollment Communications, he knows how to build a campaign, nail a message, and get inside the heads of the adult learners his team is trying to reach. And yet, a lot of his bandwidth was going to prewriting—the lengthy  process of meeting with colleagues, mapping priorities, and building campaigns from scratch before a single word went out the door.

Shawn Kennedy, who leads graduate and adult learner enrollment, was watching the same ceiling hold the team back. Holy Family had done the work: ditched the inconsistent OPM voices, built real internal collaboration, and improved  their messaging philosophy. None of it mattered if the day-to-day communication load kept monopolizing their time.

Other  strategic conversations were perpetually on the back burner.

Then Halda's AI Campaign Agent handed them back their time.

The Challenge: Cognitive Load Is Killing Your Strategy

Adult and graduate learners are a unique audience. They're stealthy, doing months of independent research before they'll admit they're interested. They're sensitive to messaging that feels generic or transactional. And they're being marketed to by every institution in the region who's also figured out that online enrollment is where the growth is.

Reaching them well requires craft, craft requires time, and time is the one thing Holy Family's enrollment team didn't have enough of.

"Comms can be a heavy lift when you're trying to figure out how to speak to X, Y, or Z," Jester said. "You spend so much energy just getting to the starting line."

Skill wasn't the problem, capacity was. Every hour in the prewriting weeds was an hour lost for  storytelling, yield strategy, or building the community-forward messaging that Holy Family had identified as its real competitive advantage, especially in the online space where community is harder to sell and more important to get right.

"We get bogged down in the day-to-day concept of messaging," Kennedy said. "And there are bigger conversations we've been wanting to have for a year."

The Solution: A Trusted Partner Gets the First Call

Holy Family has been a Halda partner since the early days, so when the opportunity came to join the AI Campaign Agent beta, the decision wasn't hard.

"We trust the Halda brand," Kennedy said. "And we wanted to be forward-thinking—really on the front line of what's working for different populations."

Jester was drawn to something specific: the chance to give feedback that shaped the product. To not just use a tool, but help build it.

"It's one thing to have a product handed to you. It's another to be able to say, 'This worked well, this didn't, here's why.' That input has been really valuable for us."

The Pilots: Start Simple, Learn Fast

Holy Family kept it focused. The pilot centered on graduate application generation, with two campaigns targeting prospects who needed a nudge to apply for spring start terms.

The first was a two-email campaign in December, intentionally simple. Limited segmentation, limited expectations. The goal was to understand how the product worked and what it produced. The second campaign took things a step further with a three-email series running weekly, segmented by program availability. If Holy Family didn't offer a spring start for a given program, that population didn't get an email. Precision mattered.

Now they're expanding into undergrad, running the AI Campaign Agent in parallel with their own app gen efforts to see exactly what the AI contributes on its own.

The Results: When the Unexpected Becomes the Point

Adult learners don't operate on enrollment team timelines. Someone who opened an email in December might apply in March and enroll in the fall. That's not a bug in the data, it's the reality of the population. Holy Family knows this, which is why they're doing a follow-up data review once things have had time to mature.

But the qualitative insights landed fast.

First, the behavioral data. Even when prospects had expressed interest in a specific graduate program, they clicked through to explore other programs and social media links when they were given the chance. It told Holy Family something important: people are looking for more than an application prompt. They're looking for a reason to believe in a community. That data is now shaping how the team thinks about future messaging.

Second, the unexpected website audit. The AI pulls content from Holy Family's public-facing site to generate campaign messaging. When it surfaced an outdated application deadline, the team had to ask a tough question: if the machine found it, what are prospective students finding?

"It gave us an objective lens on our own content," Jester said. "What are other people finding when they go looking without coming to us first?"

For an institution whose adult learner population researches in stealth mode—doing deep dives before ever reaching out—that kind of consistency across channels is everything.

Third, and maybe most importantly: the team got their time back.

"This tool takes over the burden of writing so many things," Kennedy said. "We can feed it a topic and get the campaign elements back. Then we focus on where to take it."

Jester and Kennedy still collaborate on prewriting, but the AI Campaign Agent changed the focus of those conversations. Instead of working through what to write, they're working through what really matters: personalization, storytelling, and strategy. The grunt work still gets done. It just doesn't require two smart people in a room anymore.

"I told our VP: this is going to allow me to do more of the fun stuff," Jester said. "The storytelling. The profiles. The things that actually move people."

The Bottom Line: Innovation Requires Trust (And the Right Partner)

Would they Recommend It?

Without a doubt. 

The AI Campaign Agent isn't just a message generator. It's an objective mirror for your own communications. It doesn't have opinions or blind spots, and it doesn't care about what you thought was a great subject line. It shows you what's there, and you decide what to do with it.

"Humans are subjective," he said. "We look at everything through the lens of what we like and what we don't. Having an objective product go, 'Here's what's here'—that lets you look at your own work differently. You can see what's landing, what's off, what needs to be said in a different way."

Kennedy zeroed in on the bigger picture: institutions are being asked to do more with leaner resources and higher expectations. The AI Campaign Agent is built for exactly this moment in our industry.

"It's a tool that continuously improves," he said. "And it's behind a brand that listens—not just to clients, but to the student experience. That matters."

Holy Family didn't need more people or fewer collaborations. They needed their best people spending time on their best work. The AI Campaign Agent didn't replace the creative, human energy at the center of great enrollment communications, it just stopped wasting it. The prewriting conversations still happen. But those conversations focus on personalization, stories, and strategy instead of subject lines and send dates.

Less time on the stuff that has to get done. More time on the stuff that inspires students. That's the shift worth paying attention to.