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Rebooting recruiting: Halda’s AI-powered website personalization layer revitalizes how students shop for education

On February 1st, Halda Inc., a SaaS start-up based in Provo, Utah will officially launch its newest website personalization product geared toward helping schools tailor their website experience to each visitor. Halda is already one of the most efficient software tools on the market for helping schools deliver personalized content to prospective students. This new AI-powered personalization layer helps institutions build relationships with those prospective students at scale. 

  • Decreasing enrollment populations and increasingly skeptical students mean that education institutes are struggling to fill cohorts, classes, and campuses.
  • Halda’s newest website personalization tool reimagines how visitors interact with websites by allowing them to switch between different personalized content paths.
  • The streamlined content experience triggers and sustains a substantial—usually 300-500 percent—bump in website conversions.

First, prospective students share information about themselves. Then Halda’s tools–with the help of AI–build a personalized web content experience based on that information. The result is a tailored platform where visitors can engage with customized content paths. Perhaps most beneficial about Halda is that it reengages with return visitors, serving them the specific content they seek as they build a relationship with a school. 

This personalized web experience has invigorated the tool’s early adopters and their prospective students. Recently, investors are starting to take note. Album Ventures, with participation from Kickstart Seed Fund, leads a recent seed round.

This investor interest stems from real results. For clients, Halda’s personalization tools are powerful. Over 100 educational institutions across the US have seen a consistent, sustained a 300-500 percent increase in student inquiries with the use of Halda’s personalization tools–and the benefits don’t stop at the lead stage of the funnel. Harper College, for instance, saw 10 times more enrollments from Halda-generated student inquiries than it did from its standard RFI inquiry pool.

The efficacy of the tool mirrors the efficacy of the company. Halda began with the simple observation that almost every education website had the same problem: stale calls-to-action (ie “Apply Now”) that are incongruous with their visitors’ content goals. Fixing this problem has generated positive results.

Even as most of the tech world faces sobering contractions, Halda is embracing unprecedented growth. That’s because, besides pioneering a paradigm-altering web personalization strategy, co-founders Lance Hydrick, Dallin Palmer, and Spencer Peterson bootstrapped a self-sustaining company. With their first round of funding through Album VC coming 2 years after their initial product launch, they are set up now for an efficient and rapid expansion.

“We’re excited at this recent round of funding and are grateful to our investors for their support. This funding is a testament to the hard work and dedication of our team, and will allow us to make significant investments in our product to solidify an already widening mote that will set Halda apart as the easiest way to implement a website personalization solution on the market,” explains Lance Hydrick, CEO.

This investment and expansion, however, still hinges on the all-important client experience. And the reviews are favorable. “Halda was able to deliver a strong lead generation offer that helped us start meaningful conversations,” explains Kandice King, Director of Graduate Enrollment for the University of Rochester. “To date, 70 percent of our leads have submitted an application. I have been in Higher Education Recruitment Marketing for 15 years and haven’t seen a tool yet with such rapid and relevant results.”

Halda seeks to build on those results through vision and innovation. The ultimate goal is “one-click” personalization: Using generative AI to build out entire personalized content paths based on minimal input from users. Savvy marketing and admissions teams will be able to meaningfully engage prospective students with cost-effective efficiency. The company is set to continue its 3-year pattern of doubling revenue each year as it pursues this goal.