4 Takeaways from the 2024 Cascade CMS User Conference

Over three days, Feb. 20-22, Hannon Hill’s 2024 Cascade CMS User Conference explored the ins and outs of the content management system through a smattering of sessions led by members of the Cascade community.

Roughly 350 individuals from more than 150 organizations attended virtually, making the 17th annual event the largest Cascade CMS User Conference to date.

In her welcome message, Hannon Hill CEO Kat Liendgens told attendees that she hoped the conference would “ignite your creativity, broaden your skill set and really help you maximize the benefits of Cascade for your entire organization.”

Two session tracks were available to participants, one focused on technical mastery of the CMS and the other on marketing. Here are two takeaways from each track.

The Website Is An Institution’s Front Door 

Day Kibilds, strategy director at Ologie, presented on how an institution’s website is essentially its front door. For that reason, she said, website content should be an effective tool to support equity-deserving students instead of a barrier keeping them from feeling welcome at an institution. 

“No matter the size of the school, no matter the location, if it’s public or private, or big or small, big endowment, small endowment, whatever it is, one thing has always been consistent — admissions website content sucks,” Kibilds said based on her 13-year career in admissions. 

She gave the example of an international student who is interested in applying to study business at MIT but isn’t able to easily locate admissions requirements as being a barrier. In a demonstration, Kibilds racked up 23 clicks on 17 different pages on the MIT website before finding what she was looking for.

“Who doesn’t make it through this mess? It’s the very students that we think of when we talk about diversity, equity and inclusion at our institutions. It’s the students from less privileged backgrounds without the financial or social resources, without the context or history of academia in their family or the parents with the time and energy and educational level to figure these pages out with them,” she said. 

To address the issue, Kibilds said more pages, such as a resources page for Latino/a/x students, are built. In short, she said, the more content students are given to understand, the more barriers there are for them to overcome. 

“The cognitive load may be so heavy that they might feel less than, they might feel not good enough,” she said.

Although there’s no simple fix, she cautioned, there are things individuals who write content for websites and those who build websites should keep in mind, including user stories, empathy maps and content structuring and personalization.

1. User stories break down silos

She gave the example of understanding what a first-generation Latina senior who grew up in different countries would need to know in order to apply to a business program in the U.S. without missing something. 

“When we start with this user experience as the scenario for which we’re creating content for, you can imagine how we would bring together the content of the 17 pages and give that information to the student who is looking for it without making them click 23 times,” Kibilds said.

2. Empathy maps break down assumptions

Kibilds said the maps go beyond what prospective students might need by considering what else might be competing for their time, as well as how they’re feeling about the application process. “If we had empathy maps for the content that we create on our websites, it could really inform where and how we place the content,” she said. “If we know how they are feeling, it would at minimum change our tone, but it could even change how we present information for them.”

3. Structure, personalization limit struggle

Hannon Hill’s website personalization tool, Clive, can be used to create content blocks that are tagged a certain way. Content structuring and personalization give students the content they need without them having to dig for it, Kibilds explained. 

“When a different student is looking at the site, they will see a different content block for them,” she noted. This approach, she explained, would give a domestic applicant different information than an international student.

Using Generative AI As A Tool

Bart Caylor, co-host of “The Higher Ed Marketer Podcast” and president of Caylor Solutions, presented on the impact of artificial intelligence on university marketing strategies. He specifically looked at AI’s role in personalizing communication with prospective students, using predictive analytics for data-driven decision making and optimizing digital campaigns. 

Caylor started by discussing challenges facing higher ed, like the public’s perception, the enrollment cliff and the transition from Generation Z to Generation Alpha, before noting that AI can be used to tackle these. 

“We’re going to have to get creative, and we’re going to have to do some things that are outside of the norm,” he said. “Generative AI is going to help us do that.”

He stressed that marketers shouldn’t feel threatened by generative AI but should view it as being a tool. There will be increased efficiency, Caylor added, because of its use.

However, he cautioned, marketers need to understand that generative AI isn’t Google. 

“It’s just going out and copying something and regenerating it back, but it’s not,” Caylor stressed. “We have to realize for ourselves that we may need to unlearn what we think we know and relearn things very quickly.”

It will be important to have a deep understanding of prompt engineering so that a user can coax out of AI their desired output, he said. 

He then went through some of the ways he’s using AI for his work, including brainstorming, the development of communication flow drafts, data analysis, summaries, administrative tasks, design assistance and idea visualization.

Caylor also mentioned some of the AI tools he’s currently using, such as ChatGPT for generic descriptions, Midjourney for image generation and HeyGen for video generation.

HeyGen, he said, is being utilized by some of his clients to produce videos in different languages. One way to address the enrollment cliff, he said, is to draw in more Hispanic students. He noted that college presidents are effectively using HeyGen to translate video messages into Spanish.

Cascade Version 8.24.2 Is Available

Charlie Holder, head of customer success at Hannon Hill, shared recently released features, polishes and fixes in Cascade CMS and Clive during a product updates session.

Holder explained Cascade CMS 8.24.2 is available for download. Its themes include web governance and guardrails, actionable reports, contributor education and empowerment, faster go-to-market of content, integrations, personalization and digital engagement, modules and new technologies.

1. Cascade upgrades

“Cloud customers get these upgrades as they are made available,” he explained. “There’s no waiting for this critical mass of features to be released that are in line with these themes.”

Holder specifically highlighted the edit with preview and drag and drop functions.

• Edit with preview allows users to have a side-by-side view of content changes before submitting them as opposed to the full-screen draft preview.
  “You get the edit screen and preview at the same time with a bar in the middle that can be dragged left to right to change the size of the viewer,” Holder explained.

• Drag and drop was noted as being available for elements that are repeatable, such as a dropdown that allows users to choose between different types of content components and create them sequentially as multiple columns or rows on a page. Content move/copy, multi-tab editing and image editing were also mentioned as being updates.

2. Siteimprove plug-in

He later offered a demonstration of the Siteimprove plug-in, which is only available to customers who have a Siteimprove account. 

After clicking “re-check this page,” the rendered page content was run through Siteimprove for a pre-publish check. Things like broken links, misspellings and accessibility issues were raised. 

“I can really quickly make my adjustments,” he said. “I can take care of everything all at the same time and go straight into submitting or workflow.”

3. Clive upgrades

On the Clive side, Holder noted that his team has been working on Salesforce integration with CRM. 

“We want to personalize content based on visitor interactions with our website,” he said. “We want to collect information through forms and use that information for the purposes of personalizing the experience to deliver the right content to the right audience at the right time.”

Long-term, he added, the company wants to have an ecosystem where information is accessible to a user’s CRM from Clive. Content collected from Salesforce will be sent into contact or lead objects.

Cascade CMS 9 Sneak Peek

During a session called “Cascade CMS & Clive Roadmap,” Liendgens and Bradley Wagner, vice president of engineering at Hannon Hill, provided a sneak peek into what’s on the horizon for Cascade CMS and Clive.

Wagner explained that Cascade CMS 9 themes will include new concepts such as file types, content bricks, work faster/smarter with new input modes and improved editing and actionable insights and ROI reporting.

• File types will be used to better define unique file types and their configuration the same way one currently can with Pages. Files, he said, will be able to be formally defined as images, PDFs, scripts, videos and more.
• Content bricks, Liendgens explained, are small, reusable chunks of content that can be plugged into variables and reused throughout a site.
  “We’ve seen that many of you have come up with your own ingenious workarounds for this type of functionality, and what we’re striving towards is an in-house solution that integrates seamlessly,” she said.

• Overall user experience will be improved through updates to navigation, asset views and folder content with a focus on simplification and guided user experiences, Wagner said.
  “One thing we’ve been toying with is the idea of adding visual statuses to assets to make it easy to see at a glance whether an asset is published, indexed or has as yet unpublished changes,” he explained.

• ROI reporting, Liendgens noted, will be able to track progress over time for broken links, content upgrades and contributor engagement.
  “Our approach to reports is all about zeroing in on what data you can use to make a difference in your work,” she said.