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Conference Schedule

We want to extend a big thank you to all of our amazing customers and partners who submitted a proposal to speak at this year's event. We've prepared a balance of topics for both Cascade CMS beginners and highly-technical users, as well as discussions about digital strategy and content marketing.

Please note that this is a tentative schedule subject to change.

All times are Eastern Time Zone.

P.S. Busy during Feb 20-22? Don't worry; you can watch all Day 2 & 3 sessions on demand for three months after the conference. 

Tuesday, February 20

Time Title Speaker
10:00 AM Workshop Track 1: Intro to Development in Cascade (morning session) & Advanced Velocity Coding (afternoon session)
(Morning) Learn the basics of developing in Cascade, empowering you to make additions and changes to your existing implementation. The focus of this session will be data definition modifications and updating the corresponding Velocity to account for these changes. We will also cover basic coding concepts so that you can understand your current code base. (Afternoon) Take your Velocity coding skills to the next level with our “Advanced Velocity Coding” session. This workshop delves deep into Velocity’s advanced features and techniques, equipping participants with the expertise needed to tackle complex customization tasks. Requirements: Basic understanding of how entities in Cascade are set-up, such as Templates, Configurations, Data Definitions, Content Types, etc. Understanding of fundamental programming concepts, such as variables, if/else logic, and loops. Participants are expected to have a solid understanding of basic Velocity scripting concepts, or have gone to the Intro to Development session.
Elisabeth Hutzel & Nate Sims
10:00 AM Workshop Track 2: Getting Started and Automating Content Management with Web Services
In an era of digital acceleration, leveraging web services to streamline content creation and management is paramount. Join our session on “Getting Started and Automating Content Management with Web Services” to discover the power of automation using Cascade Web Services. Requirements: Experience with Javascript, jQuery, and local development (MAMP) Basic understanding of how entities in Cascade are set-up, such as Templates, Configurations, Data Definitions, Content Types, etc.
Fernando Blanco & Rebecca Crow

Wednesday, February 21

Time Title Speaker
10:00 AM Welcome Message Kat Liendgens, Hannon Hill
10:05 AM Controlling WYSIWYG Content
Users can place just about anything inside of a WYSIWYG field. What tools do we have to restrict and help improve their content? Learn about TinyMCE’s valid_elements, how CSS files can help assist during the editing process and using Velocity to further alter WYSIWYG content before publishing. Don’t just send everything to the SerializerTool!
Vince Ruppert, Washington University in St. Louis - Engineering
10:05 AM From Careers Webpage to Where You Wanna Work!
In the challenging landscape of higher education, institutions face a dual dilemma: Attracting and retaining top talent! The 2023 Higher Education Employee Retention Survey reveals critical trends: - 33% of employees consider changing jobs within a year - 71% look at other academic roles - 61% contemplate shifting to the private sector, and - 49% seek opportunities outside higher education, primarily due to inadequate pay. Amidst these challenges, colleges must prove their value to both staff and students. Join Eddie Francis, higher-ed marketer and host of the Enrollify podcast "I Wanna Work There," at his presentation on employer branding and learn how to: - Define an effective employer brand in academia. - Strategize content for career microsites to attract talent. - Collaborate across departments to communicate employer brands effectively. By understanding and implementing these strategies, your institution can enhance its appeal, retain skilled professionals, and ensure a superior student experience.
Eddie Francis, Edify Ventures, LLC
11:00 AM Using Program Finders to Help Prospective Students
The availability and quality of a program is a major part of a prospective student's decision when choosing a college. They want to know that their choice will support their interests and goals. Academic catalogs contain this information, but are not always easy to browse and often aren't written with prospective students in mind. Our Program Finder, which was built entirely in Cascade, tries to solve these problems. The search feature works with program names, related subjects, and possible career paths. The content is written broadly enough to be evergreen, but can link catalog entries to clearly communicate current program information. Each section of a program page can be pulled into any other page to treat that program page as the sole source of information on the topic.
Jill Whitaker and Mark Whittaker, Southern Utah University
11:00 AM How to Redo a Website in 1 Year and Live to Talk About It
In 2021, our office was tasked with redesigning our university website – all 5,000+ pages. We'll discuss the process and the importance of working as a team, from RFP to focus groups and training on a new CMS to launching mid-semester. We’ll also discuss selecting a good partner and the project's success, including improvements in engagement, SEO, user experience, and more.
April Hobbs Nutter and Toni Hobbs, Morehead State University
11:55 AM Magic On Every Level: Distributing Magic Throughout The Stack
Gifted wizards combine magical elements from their environments to build enchantments. Likewise, when we deeply understand each element of our web environments, we can build enchanting experiences for everyone — from Cascade editors to website visitors. Modern web environment can be daunting: from Cascade to Apache, S3 to CloudFront, PHP to JavaScript. But know this: You can master the magic! We'll use a framework to assess the role and strengths of key technologies, ask the right questions, set practical goals, and see examples of everyday magic implemented at William & Mary.
Andrew Bauserman, William & Mary
11:55 AM Putting Students First: Navigating the Org Chart Maze in Your User-First Web Refreshes
Big institutions think and operate based on their departments, faculties and divisions. But the people you market to - your most important audience – don’t give one tin hoot about your org chart. Your future students want to find and receive information in a way they can easily understand! Learn how to really listen to them and craft killer higher-ed websites. Join us as we share how we prioritized the wants of future SAIT students, moved beyond the trappings of an IA informed by organizational structure, and based our decisions on meeting real user needs. We’ll show you how we cultivated this user-first journey and the lessons we learned along the way, including how we avoided stakeholder angst, and the different ways we continually seek success in our web projects.
Elisa Choy and Michaela Morrison, Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT)
12:45 PM Lunch
1:45 PM Updating the University of Houston Newsroom: Implementing Query API for Improved Performance
The presentation will cover the technical advancements in the UH Newsroom, focusing on the replacement of index blocks with Query API, and the use of Velocity with preexisting news articles. We'll highlight the benefits of this upgrade: - Faster rendering and publishing times, - Enhanced metadata and structured-data-nodes retrieval, and - Improved code design and maintainability.
Kevin Glidden, University of Houston
1:45 PM Reclaiming our University Website
For many years digital spaces were not a priority at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. The website was managed by over 400 people across 300 separate sites with little administrative or campus buy-in for a central digital strategy. In 2020, the first central web team was established and since then we have worked to bring order and purpose to our website through cohesive branding, a reimagined structure, and modern features. How did we shift to a more centralized model? How did we determine priorities when so much needed to be done? How did we communicate strategy and the reasons for change? Join us!
Jenny Martin and Tim Wombles, University of Missouri-St. Louis
2:40 PM Best Practices for Optimal Performance with Cascade CMS
Unlock the full potential of Cascade CMS with our focused presentation on user management, site organization, workflow efficiency, and web governance. Learn proven strategies to enhance collaboration, streamline content production, and maintain a cohesive and compliant online presence. Whether you’re a novice or an experienced user, discover key insights to elevate your Cascade CMS experience and achieve optimal performance.
Charlie Holder and Sam Skinner, Hannon Hill
2:40 PM SEO for growing college enrollment and reputation
Google page one is destiny. Colleges and universities that pursue and achieve top organic Google rankings using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques prosper and thrive. They build reputation with thought leadership content. Their best prospective students prefer to “discover” the college of their choice through “accidental finds” on Google page one. Their best donors “discover” them when looking for institutions that are aligned with their values. We will give you an SEO overview for colleges and show examples of how colleges were able to dramatically grow their enrollment and reputation with SEO.
Abu Noaman, Elliance
3:40 PM Evolution of End User Training and Documentation
The University of Western Ontario began using Cascade CMS in early 2009. The school currently has 703 sites and 1053 users in Cascade with regular ongoing requests for new sites and new users continuing to be added. As the number of sites and user base evolved in Cascade for the university, so has the requirement and delivery of end user training and documentation. By taking a look at what we used to do, to what we do now, and to what changeup we are considering to do going forward, along the way we will take a look at what worked, what didn’t and why.
James Dobravec, Western University
3:40 PM Brick by Brick: A Smarter Way to Build Your Web Content Strategy
It never fails: Weeks after you make a system-wide change on your site, users start finding pages with the old content. Text updates can be a nightmare for web content teams - but they don't have to be anymore! Content bricks, a Cascade CMS feature, is similar to a mail merge code. A user can edit content in one location and have it reflected in multiple different design components (different font, color, size). Doreen Fagerheim, Assistant Vice President for Digital Media and Web Marketing at Belhaven University, and Sandra Fancher, Chief Innovation Officer at Stamats, discuss how to create and implement content bricks. In this session, you'll learn what content bricks are, the strategy Belhaven used to set them up, and tips to implement an efficient content bricks strategy throughout your own Cascade site.
Sandra Fancher, Stamats and Doreen Fagerheim, Belhaven University
4:20 PM Your content: The most ignored barrier to education
Your website is the front door to your institution. And that door can be open... or closed. Your web content can be an effective tool to support equity-deserving students. Or it could be the barrier keeping them from understanding instructions, following processes and feeling welcome at your institution. Drawing from a personal story in higher education and supported by recent industry research findings, this talk will showcase how traditional admissions websites can exclude the very groups we want to include — and it will arm you with the arguments to convince your institution to do something about it.
Dayana Kibilds, Ologie

Thursday, February 22

Time Title Speaker
10:00 AM Cascade CMS & Clive Roadmap
The Product Roadmap has been one of the most highly anticipated sessions for many years. Hannon Hill’s VP of Product, Bradley Wagner, and CEO Kat Liendgens will share our product philosophy and themes, provide a quick summary of recently released features, and give attendees a sneak peek into what’s on the horizon for Cascade CMS and Clive.
Kat Liendgens & Bradley Wagner, Hannon Hill
11:15 AM Recent Releases
Join Charlie Holder, Hannon Hill's Head of Success, as he will walk you through recently-released features, polishes, and fixes in Cascade CMS and Clive.
Charlie Holder, Hannon Hill
12:15 PM Lunch
1:15 PM The API Awakens: Unleashing Efficiency with Cascade
We invite you on a journey through our website transition, showcasing how the Cascade API played a pivotal role in our transformation. We'll share our story, revealing the challenges we faced and the moments that led us to embrace the power of the API. Join us as we highlight how the Cascade API became the cornerstone of our daily operations, revolutionizing how we work and interact with Cascade. This presentation will empower you with insights from our experience on leveraging the API to simplify your day-to-day tasks, just as it has transformed ours. Discover the possibilities and embark on your path to enhanced efficiency and productivity.
Philip Kukla, Danielle Ferrell & Zachery Morgan, University of North Carolina Wilmington
1:15 PM Crafting Strong Academic Program Pages at Scale: A Comprehensive Approach with Content Governance, Systems Thinking, and Content Modeling
This presentation explores a systematic methodology for building robust academic program pages through the integration of content governance, systems thinking, and content modeling at scale. We will delve into the importance of content governance in maintaining consistency, discuss the holistic perspective offered by systems thinking, and showcase how content modeling at scale streamlines information organization. Attendees will gain practical insights to enhance their institution's online presence, attract the right audience, and elevate the success of academic programs in a competitive educational landscape by leveraging the talent and inputs of academic leadership, marketing, and developers.
Matt Herzberger, VisionPoint Marketing
2:10 PM JavaScript to check accessibility in preview
Accessibility has always been a struggle for our content creators. We have over 400 publishers. Training each one on the proper rules to follow is challenging. Our new approach is to build in a JavaScript accessibility check that looks for the most common errors our users make and then provides information on how to fix these errors. All before publishing.
Dr. Jason Beers, California State Polytechnic University--Pomona
2:10 PM Best uses of AI in Higher Ed Marketing
Join Bart Caylor, co-host of the Higher Ed Marketer Podcast and one of the leading voices on artificial intelligence in higher education. This session explores the transformative impact of artificial intelligence on university marketing strategies and delves into AI's role in personalizing communication with prospective students, using predictive analytics for data-driven decision-making, and optimizing digital campaigns.
Bart Caylor, The Higher Ed Marketer
3:05 PM Getting started with Clive: A session On Website Personalization
Learn everything you need to know to get started with Clive, Hannon Hill's web personalization tool. In this session, Graham Lewis session will cover the setup, creation and implementation of Clive Forms, Smart Content and Segments.
Graham Lewis, Hannon Hill
3:05 PM Using Epic Content Marketing in Higher Education
Higher ed institutions create so much content on so many channels, how do you know what should take priority, and know how it’s impacting your strategic goals? We’ll explore how content marketing is different from other marketing, why it’s ideal for higher education, and how you can use it to reach your higher education goals. You will learn how to set up an effective content marketing strategy, how to get leadership buy-in, and how this will help you better connect with your users and become a trusted resource for them. We'll discuss: 1) What is content marketing 2) Misconceptions about content marketing 3) How to convince leadership to support a content marketing strategy 4) How to create epic content to market your institution 5) The rise of content marketing in higher education 6) Successful content marketing strategies & case studies 7) How to track the success and demonstrate the impact 8) Using AI and data to optimize your content marketing
Brian Piper, University of Rochester
4:00 PM Keynote Roundtable Discussion on the Demographic Enrollment Cliff
Join a selected panel of higher-education marketing leaders to learn how you can safely navigate the looming demographic enrollment cliff—a session you don't want to miss.
A panel of higher-ed leaders, including Jaime Hunt, Kristin Nichols, and Allison Turcio