More than 11,000 families visit Flagstaff each year, and every visit comes with questions in the moment: Where do I park? I'm lost. I'm running late.
NAU's events team used to handle the outreach by hand. Every email was sent manually, each visitor got a phone call, and a family who signed up four months out got the same cadence as one who signed up two weeks out. Once a family left the tour, nothing connected their visit to the university.
NAU partnered with CollegeVine to build Cline, a campus visit agent.
"We really wanted to level up the visit experience and create a more connected, end-to-end opportunity for our team to engage, drive enrollment, and capture that next step of interest." - Marcela Pino Alcaraz, Associate Vice President, Strategic Enrollment and Marketing, Northern Arizona University
A touchpoint for every phase of the visit
A live line into Eventbrite brings each registration to Cline as families book, with one record per visitor. From there, Cline reaches out at registration, five days out, the day before, the morning of, and after the tour, with a short check-in that captures the visit while it is still fresh. Families can text back a question about parking or lunch and get an answer at any hour. The team now configures 0 emails by hand.
What happened over 90 days
From July to September 2026, Cline sent 7,926 messages to 1,770 students, and 648 of them replied, a 36.6% reply rate. The median response took 11 seconds, and 46.5% of replies arrived outside office hours.
Families asked about more than logistics. Academics and majors made up the largest share of questions at 33%, ahead of tour day and itinerary and parking and arrival at 15% each.
Maggie Thom, Senior Director of Strategic Enrollment and Marketing, described what that visibility means for the team: "Being able to track visitor trends in real time empowers our team to embrace true data-informed decision-making across the department and division."
What's next
Cline is one capability inside NAU's enrollment ontology, a shared model of the whole enrollment operation. As more agents add information over time, NAU will know what drew a student in by the time they enroll. NAU plans to use what visitors ask to help families decide whether NAU is the right fit, and to shape the visit and outreach around the interests of the students coming to campus.
The full case study walks through Cline's conversations with families, the complete results, and how NAU is turning hospitality into enrollment strategy.
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