By Angela Seckinger — Oct 25, 2018 11:00 AM
Cascade CMS helps developers, admins and marketers better manage their websites. The Cassie Awards are awarded to those organizations and individuals that have achieved exceptional accomplishments with their websites through Cascade CMS. Many hope to win one of the highly coveted Cassie Award trophies and this year was no exception. In fact, with an ever increasing community of Cascade CMS powered websites, the stakes are higher than ever. During the 2018 Cascade User Conference, the winners were announced and surprisingly, unbeknownst to them, several of the recipients were even seated at the exact same table. Like minds definitely congregate together, it seems. Their utilization of Cascade CMS is definitely driving their website success today. Let’s take a look at this year’s winners.
The 2018 Cassie Awards:
Cascade Customer MVP
This category is for the user that is the most helpful advisor to others in the CMS community. To be selected for this category, we typically look for those users that are most active and who typically provide tons of helpful advice to others whether it is through Slack or other communication channels. We also look for anyone who regularly submits ideas on Idea Exchange, and/or readily shares code, shortcuts and feedback. They are usually the first ones you can request examples and specific experiences from, and are great sounding boards for your ideas. Specifically, this person also shared their workflows and even presented during the Cascade User Conference. She is this year’s Cascade Customer MVP and we congratulate Berta Roebuck of the University of San Diego for being a truly helpful user of Cascade CMS.
Most innovative Cascade Implementation
For this award, we look at the Cascade CMS implementation as a whole and determine who has the most creative use of the solution. We think about how the team is integrating with other systems, how flexible and scalable it is, the end user experience on the website and what it is that makes their site most effective online. Although the updated version of their site is not even live yet, the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota worked closely with the Cascade CMS Services team to develop a very special website. In fact, they are connecting their program finder through API to Flatbridge, an education database platform. Ashley Lang and Vidya Neni were present at the Cascade User Conference to accept the award.
Cascade Shooting Star
This category is for new users that are the quickest to roll out a new website using Cascade CMS. These users are typically really fast at adapting to the system, and are in a sense “rookie of the year” with the solution. The selected winner learned the system exceptionally well in a short amount of time, had a small team and only 1 developer, Haley Dickinson, and still managed to roll out the entire implementation on their own including content migrations. Unable to attend the Cascade User Conference, Hudson Valley Community College will be receiving the award in the mail.
Cascade Best in Class
The newest user that is the best at getting up to speed learning Cascade CMS is usually selected as the Best in Class. The University of the Incarnate Word really excelled at their training sessions, and quickly learned processes and shortcuts. This team is now empowered to implement fast updates, train other users in their team and quickly take advantage of a flexible website management system.
Best New Site
The users that have rolled out the best new website based on design, content, technical functional and any other subjective measurement often win in this category. State Center Community College District is the team that really stood out for this award. The district also won the Gold medal in the international 2017 dotCOMM Awards competition. In fact, they didn’t do this just with one site, but multiple sites under their domain. Their use of Cascade CMS to deliver exceptional design while maintaining individual branding and overall consistency was further enhanced by the utilization of COPE, which allows shared content across many sites. It is clear to see why State Center Community College District won the Best New Site Cassie Award during the 2018 Cascade User Conference.
Congratulations to all the 2018 Cassie Award Winners. We look forward to hearing more about your successes with Cascade CMS and hope you will set the example for 2019 and beyond.