New Orleans Career Center Community Story: The Emails That Went Unanswered

Austin Richards' job is to tell the New Orleans Career Center's story. For a long time, a good part of his week went to a shared inbox instead, answering the same enrollment questions over and over. Here's what changed when those answers moved onto the Career Center's own website.

Austin and the Career Center

"The Career Center serves high school students in New Orleans, but also young adults who are transitioning to work. Our instructors and our trainees are what we are most known for." — Austin Richards, Communications Coordinator, New Orleans Career Center

New Orleans Career Center trains high school students and young adults for work in healthcare, building trades, culinary arts, and engineering. Founded in 2017, it now works with more than 25 partner schools and runs morning, afternoon, and evening sessions out of its building on Kerlerec Street.

Austin works on the support side of that. Marketing, communications, strategy, social media, and the part he cares about most: being in the training rooms, capturing photos and video of trainees so the rest of the city can see what they are building.

"Managing the day is always a juggle," he says. "It's toggling between emails and requests that are emergent in the organization at the time."

Before: emails that went unanswered

"We had an inbox, a Gmail account, info at nolacc.org. And a lot of the times those emails either went unanswered for a period of time, because it wasn't the top priority. Because I'm also managing my own email, and I'm also looking for inbound questions from social media." — Austin Richards

When someone in the community needed information, it landed in a shared inbox that one person watched alongside everything else. Real questions sat next to junk mail from bots that had scraped the address. Sorting out which messages needed a reply, and who on staff should give it, was its own job.

The questions followed a pattern. Around enrollment, it was always the same ones: when does this start, when can I apply, when does this happen. The team built template replies so they could answer with one click, and they added an FAQ page so they could point people to the website instead.

It helped. But the team still could not see the whole picture. "We didn't know what the actual trends were," Austin says. "We were just responding to a bunch of emails, and we would have to figure out the trend over time. But we don't always think in that way, because we're trying to get to the next thing."

What it cost

"Emails are probably the most frustrating part of my work. Before, it was sitting there responding to emails at the time that I really needed to be doing something that was more of a priority." — Austin Richards

The cost was not dramatic. It was quiet. Every hour in the inbox was an hour Austin was not in a classroom with a camera, capturing the stories that bring the next class of trainees, the next partner school, and the next funder through the door.

That is the work only he can do. The inbox was the work anyone could do, and so it fell to him.

What changed on the site

"It was really, really easy. When someone says this type of technology is going to be used, you think it's going to be like installing Microsoft Word to a laptop. But it was a lot easier than that. It was just, plug in this code. I think we did it in five minutes when we sat for thirty." — Austin Richards

In June 2026, Austin added Civilized's chat and search bar to the Career Center's Squarespace site during a single Zoom call with the Civilized team. Nothing was replaced. The answers come from the Career Center's own pages and social posts, more than a hundred of them, and nowhere else.

That last part mattered internally. Some staff heard "AI" and pictured something that makes things up. Austin's explanation was simple: "It's an AI tool that is searching through our website. It's not creating something brand new. It's not a ChatGPT type service. It's really tailored to our website, and it's what we tell it to tell people."

He asked staff to test it after launch. The first questions were playful, like "who's the coolest staff member?" That turned out to be useful. It gave Austin a way to show exactly what the tool does and does not do, and it got the team comfortable enough to tell other people about it. His supervisor was on board from the start. "He was like, this seems like a very different way for people to search or get answers on our website," Austin says. Most site search bars return a list of pages. This one answers the question.

The calls that stopped

"Sometimes of the year we get that uptick where we have so many people asking the same question. What that would usually lead to is a bunch of calls at the front office, or a bunch of emails at info at nolacc.org. We don't get that anymore. Now people get those questions answered by typing it directly on our website." — Austin Richards

The Career Center has always had a lot of website traffic. There are a lot of schools in New Orleans and a lot of families who could use what it offers. What changed is what people do once they arrive. "Before, they would go to Google and try to find this thing, or they would go to the website and maybe leave," Austin says. "I feel like we have a lot more retention on the website now, because people are going there to get the answers that they need."

And Austin got his week back. "Now I get to do the most rewarding part of my work, which is to be amongst young people, taking photos, capturing content to be able to share it with other people."

What the team learned they were not saying

"It showed us that what the public wants to know from us is something that we don't share, which is enrollment dates. We share it, but we share it directly to the people who are enrolled." — Austin Richards

Every week, Austin gets an email digest of what people asked on the site and what the site could not answer. When the same question shows up for a few weeks in a row, the team knows it is time to act.

The biggest surprise was enrollment dates. The Career Center had always communicated them, but to families who were already in. The public was asking when they could apply and finding nothing. Now the team has the language, and the evidence, to put that information where people are looking. "It's helped us find the language to say, this is what we do and how we do it," Austin says. "We've been able to inform our processes a little because of the questions we get."

He checks the dashboard the same way every time. "The first thing I'm looking for is a content gap, so I can find the trend and know this is what I need to respond to, or this is what's missing from our website. I don't think most tools do that. Most tools are just tracking. This tool is telling you how to improve your website."

The biggest relief

"My biggest relief is knowing that someone can go to our website and get the answer that they need in a matter of seconds. We built a website and we like the website, but we know where things are on it. Everyone who goes to our website won't know what we know. Now they do." — Austin Richards

Asked to finish the sentence "Before, I used to worry about," Austin lands on the thing communications people carry around quietly: "What information was missing, or what was miscommunicated. And now I have a way to know that. Before, we didn't have a way to know what people expected of the website. Now we do."

What Austin wants next

"What I like the most is the email digest, and I would like to see more of that embedded into the actual dashboard. It just gives me more time back to my day, just like it already does. It's crazy that now I'm like, give me more time." — Austin Richards

Austin's honest feedback is that the weekly digest and the dashboard still feel like two screens. He reads a trend in the email, then goes hunting for it in the content-gap view. He wants them in one place, so he can spot the problem and publish the fix sooner. That request is now with our product team.

His far-fetched ask is not that far-fetched. The Career Center runs on Google Drive, and, as he puts it, "unless you're the person who put it there, you don't know how to find it. And even if you're the person who put it there, you might not be able to find it." He would like the same kind of answers for the team's own documents, schedules, and meetings that the public now gets on the website.

For the communications team of one

"This is a really light lift. It's something easy to implement. The dashboard itself is very helpful. It gives you all the things you need to know and puts it in a way that you can address it." — Austin Richards

The core Civilized platform is free. It works with the website you already have, and the answers come only from your content. For a communications team that is also the inbox team, the social team, and the photography team, that is one job handed off so the others get done.

At the end of the conversation, Austin volunteered the question he wished he had been asked: what would his work look like if he stopped using it? "It's almost like taking a step back, where I feel like we've been able to take so many steps forward. We would still be in the space of not having a website that provided the information we thought it did."

If your team is answering the same questions by hand, see how it works or read how to answer your community's questions when your team is stretched thin.

About New Orleans Career Center

New Orleans Career Center is the city's hub for high-quality technical education, training high school students and young adults for careers in healthcare, building trades, culinary arts, and engineering, so every graduate has the power to shape their future and the future of New Orleans. Learn more at nolacc.org or connect with Austin Richards on LinkedIn.