Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Guest: Most systems are striving to find that right balance between giving the users the flexibility they want by being able to make changes to page layouts on the fly, remove components without having it involved in it, but also supporting more robust web governance.
[00:00:27] Host: Welcome to the EdTech Connect podcast, your source for exploring the cutting edge world of educational technology. I'm your host, Jeff Dillon, and I'm excited to bring you insights and inspiration from the brightest minds and innovators shaping the future of education. We'll dive into conversations with leading experts, educators and solution providers who are transforming the learning landscape. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform so you don't miss an episode. So sit back, relax, and let's dive in.
Today I have a fascinating guest who is at the forefront of the content management revolution, Kat Liendgens. Kat is the CEO of Hannon Hill, a leading provider of content management and personal personalization solutions for higher ed. She's been with the company for over 13 years, and during that time she's overseen remarkable growth. Kat's career is marked by a commitment to innovation and a knack for transforming challenges into opportunities. Under her leadership, Hannon Hill has helped countless organizations unlock the power of their content, enabling them to connect with their audiences in a more meaningful and personalized ways. Get ready for an insightful conversation as we uncover the secrets to content success and explore the future of the CMS, including the exciting world of AI and personalization. Welcome, Kat.
[00:02:02] Guest: Hey, Jeff, thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
[00:02:06] Host: Yeah, me too. So, as maybe the listeners don't know, I have some pretty deep experience with Cascade and I've known you since that inception back in Sacramento when we started using Cascade. So that's all. I've known you as the CEO of Hannon Hill, and we've worked closely on different things, but I kind of wanted to start before that. And you know, I've never really talked to you about what got you where you. Where you are. You have a master's in information technology.
What first drew you into the field and what were some of the early challenges and opportunities you encountered?
[00:02:43] Guest: Yeah, so most people say that they've always been fascinated by technology and I'm actually, I'm actually not one of these people in. In fact, I used to be almost a bit intimidated by it, to the point where when I was in college, I almost dropped a course because it required a computer. This really dates me, but that's just the way it was. But I think at the end of the day, that's really why I went into the field because I always thought that when you're intimidated by something, it's just super rewarding to go after it and go after it full force. You know, it became even more rewarding to, to help others do the same. And that's kind of why I enjoyed academia where I was able to teach people programming. Even though there were some, some people that have, you know, they were afraid of it, that was not their favorite course is to, you know, learn how to, how to program in Java. And so just kind of helping them go through that same process. And so that's kind of what got me started with technology. And I always really appreciated the, the potential of technology to drive innovation, to transform the way that we work and more importantly, the way that we communicate with each other. So the connecting people part is what I always really enjoyed. And yeah, in terms of challenges, it's crazy to think that my first laptop that I had had two gigs of storage and I thought this was just ginormous and maybe 64 megabytes of RAM. And that was a bit limiting, but of course nothing is ever big enough.
[00:04:19] Host: Well, we're going to probably date ourselves here, but I don't care because I was in the same boat. And I remember back before even content management systems were really around and I think the big one was Dreamweaver Contribute. Everyone had the contribute product, which was kind of a CMS. But it was back then that we were all looking at Hannah Hill and I discovered Hannon Hill. But what was your academic ties beforehand, Hill? Were you around the faculty side?
[00:04:51] Guest: Yeah, so I, I was faculty and I ran the software development department and oversaw the faculty there.
[00:04:59] Host: Okay. I think it's timing sometimes where, you know, you and I are probably similar generationally here. Like we were at the right time in the right place to like, you know, it almost falls in your lap. You're like, I like this and it's happening. And in your early roles, tell me what you felt like the CMS landscape looked like. What were the prevailing technologies and trends back in the day when, when you were young. When the company was young.
[00:05:26] Guest: Yeah, so. So back in the day there really weren't that many CMS around other than, you know, the ones that you just mentioned. Yeah, there were many, many organizations when I first joined Hand Hill that didn't even have a CMS. So, you know, typically, you know, when you're trying to sell your product, you know, you basically just point out how the product can help solve you know, problems, but most of all why your product is better than other products on the market. But because they really were, you know, so, so many organizations weren't even using a CMS. We had to demonstrate why there was even a need for a cms because it was just a new world. Right. And then the CMS that were available a lot of times, like they were pretty bare bones and not at all designed for scalability as you alluded to. And then content was, I mean it was mostly stored in those giant WYSIWYG editors. Right. So that makes it completely not portable these days. Of course we have smaller, smarter chunks, more portable stuff, but that wasn't the case. There were some open source products available, but at the time, I think open source is doing much better with scalability now. But the products that were available back then, it was just really, really difficult to manage a number of different sites. It also took a lot longer to build software, honestly. So you know, like there were new products coming out. But you know, these days, you know, because of AI and other advances, like you have new products coming out every single day.
[00:07:00] Speaker B: So what are the biggest things? I feel like in the last five years we're really, we've really seen a lot of evolution. You know, we, we both know like back in the day it was, it was very one sided, right. We need to create these pages. We need to manage who can easily create pages because the webmaster is getting overloaded. They can't do everything, right. So let's, let's let these content editors own their areas. And then we ended up in kind of a place where there's just too much out there. Now we're a little bit of a victims of our own success here. And I know this has been the case for a while now, so I'm kind of trying to set the stage of the evolution so we have this content sprawl. We have more of an expectation of interactivity. Right. It's not just, it's not just a publishing a static page, but it's like how do I interact with my campus? So tell me, what are the major shifts you're seeing in technology in the expectations of users and the business needs that you're seeing?
[00:08:02] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a great question. Yeah. As you mentioned, back in the day, everything was more static, it was less interactive and we've now evolved to being more dynamic, more interactive. But I also think that with a lot of CMSs, especially in higher education, I think what I've seen is that most systems are striving to find that right balance between giving the users the flexibility they want by being able to make changes to page layouts on the fly, remove components without having it involved in it, but also supporting more robust web governance so that it's not a free for all. A lot of times you have to decide between either having very robust CMS infrastructure where your users were getting a little frustrated, why can't I do this? And why can't I do that?
Or you had to choose to go the mayhem route like you mentioned, where it's a free for all and we all know where that ends up if you let users just do anything.
I think one of the biggest changes that I've seen is that CMS developers are more thoughtful and are trying to find that right balance. Then one thing that I think tooting our own horn here, but one of the things that I think we do pretty well at hand on hill with our CMS is that we strive to actually help educate content contributors so that they can learn how to make their content more effective. And I think that's something that we do really, really well so we don't overwhelm them with things by showing them reports or things that they can't do anything about. And then there's this technical terror, but we provide them with action items. Right. So with things that, that show them. Hey, by the way, you know, if you use this title, this might really help you or you know, this is, you know, a good summary for your content. Or by the way, this content hasn't been updated in 12 months. You might want to take a look at this. Right. And then of course, other things like broken links, accessibility, all that good stuff. So I think, you know, the biggest thing that I've seen that good CMSs do very, very well is to have that end user in mind and helping them make their content more effective.
[00:10:31] Speaker B: So you have some web governance tools built into your product. Right, is what I'm hearing. And that's, that's new news to me a little bit because, you know, I've been out of the academia for a while, so that's great to hear, like whether you have to bolt something on or if it's included. I love to hear that since you're so higher ed focused, you kind of have to align your product roadmap with the higher ed needs, I guess, right?
[00:10:57] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, most of our customers are in higher ed and one of the things that we do is we talk to customers every single day. We are on higher ed websites every single day. And when we meet with our customers, we want to make sure that we address the needs of both the technical users, the people that are in charge of the marketing strategy, and in some cases, even end users. And so it's really important to keep all types of users in mind. And that's one thing that I learned in academia and consulting is that you really have to listen to your customers and focus on what they're trying to do and not, hey, I can build this feature because it's just, I call it demo Dazzle. It makes it easy to sell, but if it's not fostering the needs and not helping the needs of the organization, it's useless.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: Well, let's dive a little bit into personalization, the topic that's been talked about for 20 plus years now. It's not new, but why?
I know Hannah Hill has a product that can help support this thing. It's called Clive. Helps you personalize content. Tell us about your thought on personalization. Why has it been so difficult for higher ed? Or am I off here? Is it like, oh, yeah, no big deal. How does technology, how does Clive work? And what's your thought on personalization in higher ed? Where are we going?
[00:12:27] Speaker A: Yeah. So we started building Clive, our personalization tool, long, long before personalization was even a topic in higher education.
Because it became very clear to us that it would be very big in the future. And we wanted to have a tool ready when our customers were ready. So we started building this a long time ago and put a lot of thought into this.
One of the things that we kept thinking about or researching is, you know, how do higher education adjust to the real world? Because, you know, our prospective students, they grew up with personalization. They see it everywhere else. Right? They. Not just Netflix and Amazon, which are the classic examples. But I mean, you look at your watch and you have all of your personal data right there. Right?
Everything is personalized. And so that's just something that was expected. And then we found several studies that really showed that if students had that personalized experience, they were more, more likely to enroll. And then it really had a ripple effect that it would foster more engagement while people were enrolled, while they were at, you know, in their tenure at the university, and then, you know, down the road, they were more likely to donate. So it was very clear that this would become a necessity for higher education. So that's why we built Clive. And the way that it works is that it really starts with collecting data about every single individual visitor. Right. I always say, you know, your prospective Students or your donors, they don't want to be looked at as a demographic. They want to be looked at as an individual. And so Clive gathers information about each visitor. So that could be through forms, it could be through the visitor's location, and then also important, the behavior. You know, the behavior on your site, whether that's the page views, the number of visits, the search terms. And so then it allows you to essentially categorize your visitors into different segments based on that data that it collects, and that allows you to then deliver that targeted content. So Clive lets you identify different content. We call it snippets.
So whether that's just text, a paragraph on your page, or an image or a call to action, it could even be navigation. So you can deliver those targeted personalized snippets based on those segments that I was just talking about. And that really ensures that every single user receives relevant information in terms of what their interests are, you know, and they receive it in a way that they prefer to see it and when they need to see it, because timing is also important when it comes to personalization.
[00:15:27] Speaker B: So there's these buckets, you're saying, these segments, where I'm envisioning it might be a handful of segments like prospective students, current students, staff. Like the buckets, like that. Is that what you're thinking?
[00:15:41] Speaker A: So you can. You can go. You can go broad with your segments and just say prospective students in general or current students in general. But you can get really, really deep, and you can have very narrow segments, and that a lot of times makes it easier to measure success. So, for example, you know, we have a customer who specifically targets prospective students that are located in Nigeria that are interested in a specific program. So you can go very, very narrow with that as well.
[00:16:14] Speaker B: So you're getting it from their. Their behavior, their clicks on your website. Are you asking, do you ask them upfront anything like, are you this, or is it all just taken from their. What they're. What they're interacting with?
[00:16:28] Speaker A: Yeah, that's another good question. So we have some customers that collect the information just by asking them, hey, what, you know what, into what group do you fall? Are you a prospective student? Are you a faculty member? You can also just, like, identify it by page URL. So if you have like a. A section for international students, you know, prospective international students, you can do it like this. But then also, you know, even if you have certain ads where you target a specific Persona, let's just say that, you know, we have a lot of customers that target members of the military or veterans. So let's just say you have a social media ad that is targeted towards that particular audience and if they click on it and you know, come to a landing page, all you have to do is just append a little parameter to the URL. So then when they come to your website, you have that information. So you've already spent a lot of time with your landing page. Well, why don't you take us a step further? Use the information that you've gathered about your visitor and you can customize really anything on your website. Then a couple of other creative uses that I've seen is create digital view books because, you know, you don't want to ask too much personal information, but people are typically pretty happy to provide a certain level of information if they get something of value in return. So we've had some customers that have created those dynamic digital view books. So they ask the prospective students about what they're interested in, what programs they're interested in, what type of information they want, and then in return they get those beautiful customized view books. But in the process, you've collected a lot of valuable information that allows you to customize different sections of your website for that individual.
[00:18:20] Speaker B: Yeah, that sounds really, I mean, I'm impressed with how long you've had Clive, and how you kind of predicted this, you know, way back. I remember when this came out, back when I was at Sacramento State. But are you seeing anything challenges with, with adoption? Is it kind of a no brainer? You just need to like your current clients, Are they really, is this a priority for them? Like why, why is higher ed so slow to go this direction? And maybe, maybe there, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you're like, oh no, they're all doing it now. But I felt like it's just so slow. What's, what's happening out there?
[00:18:55] Speaker A: I mean one, you know, we always kind of say that traditionally higher education has been a bit digitally shy. So they want to make sure that this works for, you know, works everywhere else before they take on this risk. No, I think that, you know, there are obviously some, you know, concerns about, you know, privacy. You know, make sure that it follows the guidelines, that it's not creepy. But I think most importantly, I think, you know, one of the most important challenges here for higher education is just time and resources and maybe the misconception that you have to, that is just this massive, massive project. And now you have to write, you know, 20 different versions for every page of every page in order to appeal to different audiences. When in fact you can start super small with just a few experiments and see some distraction.
[00:19:49] Speaker B: Well, that's, that's what I was thinking too, and I didn't. I kind of wanted to see what you were thinking about. You know, it doesn't have to be an overhaul and moving to a full DXP that has a customer data platform in it. And that's kind of a perception out there that's like, oh, yeah, but that's a huge project for us. So there are easy ways to test personalization. And I also think the term personalization is almost becoming outdated, you know, and I think the best personalization is when you don't know it's happening. Like, and that's how these big brands do it. You just. It's just there. And so we just, you know, it's. It's kind of tough. And they're also. Higher ed is really distracted by the shiny new AI thing out there. So that's where I want to talk to you next is. I was at one of the conferences recently where I always see Hannon Hill and went over to your booth and was talking to, I think, Graham about, like I said, you know, the first thing I thought CMS should do when, when AI came out is like, why do you have it write all your meta metadata? Like you have all the content there. All these web editors are like not putting in their web, their meta descriptions. Why don't we have AI do that? He's like, oh, yeah, we're doing that. I'm like, whoa, whoa, cool. So tell me about your AI, like, your thoughts on AI, how AI is affecting your evolution of your product and what's your thoughts on AI?
[00:21:05] Speaker A: I mean, AI has just incredible potential, but with everything, you have to take your time with it. You can't just dive into it and hope for the best. You know, one of the, you know, speaking of challenges for higher ed, I think, you know, we have to be a bit careful because a lot of higher education institutions, they don't even have a policy yet or when it comes to AI. Right. But I think the potential is amazing. Yeah. So, you know, as you mentioned when you were talking with Graham at the conference, you know, we thought about the easiest foray into it would be through the generation suggestions of metadata you can still overwrite. I think the human still has to be in control and make the final decision. But yeah, AI to generate suggestions for things like titles and keywords and summaries and things like that. And then my favorite AI feature that we've put in the production is just the generation of alt text for images, because humans tend to be pretty terrible at writing alt text for images. We actually had a lot of customers, they recognized their shortcoming in that regard. So they were actually using other AI tools and uploading the images and have them generate the AI text for the alt text for them. And then they moved it into the cms. And so we thought, well, that's a waste of time. Let's just go ahead and build that right into the tool. And so. And that's, that's gotten a lot of adoption. We use it internally all the time. But yeah, I think that, you know, I, I could go on and on about AI, but there's so much potential also when it comes to personalization, when it comes to helping enhance accessibility, even things like predictive content creation. Yeah, just supporting content lifecycle. So there's so much that I can do to really help content be more effective.
[00:23:07] Speaker B: Yeah, I love your take on AI, because it kind of really aligns with mine too, is that, you know, higher ed wants to make sure. I think they're not missing the boat. You know, we know AI is coming. We see the power of it because we can use it ourselves now. But the hallucinations and the cost of getting it wrong is so high in higher ed, not like some other industries where they can play around with it. So your first kind of integration with this, with suggestions is what I'm seeing with some other leading companies too, where, oh, yeah, you don't have to, you know, all you have to do is kind of approve all these or change them. I think that's a great step. So, you know, and you said you were going to toot your own horn earlier. And I'll do it a little bit for you here in that I've seen the space out there with different vendors. Like, there's only a few CMS vendors out there that focus exclusively on higher ed, and you're in that select set. Then there's other big open source in the whole community. So, you know, I think really it's fun to watch the direction that you're going. You know, I would say optimistically and cautiously, like developing your product. But yeah, I want to thank you for being on the show and just say, is there anything else you want to leave our audience that. Let's say we're talking to marketers and web directors that are, you know, they are. They have content, maybe too much content or content problem. They're looking, I've heard a lot of schools looking to replatform or, you know, a web design might go with a CMS replatform. What are some tips or considerations that those people need to think about? As a final note, my biggest tip.
[00:24:39] Speaker A: Would be when you issue your RFPs or when you talk to different vendors, start with the problems that you're trying to solve. You know, don't, don't go out and say, well, we have this feature list that we're looking for because nobody buys software just for the sake of buying software to have a specific feature. Right? It's all about how can I achieve my outcome. So by focusing on that, I think you're going to make the best possible decision.
[00:25:11] Speaker B: Thank you, Kat. Great tip. I'm going to close the show and thank you for being on. If you want to contact Kat, we'll leave some links in the show notes. And great talk to you, Kat.
[00:25:23] Speaker A: Thanks so much, Jeff.
[00:25:24] Speaker B: Bye. Bye.
[00:25:25] Speaker A: Bye.
[00:25:30] Speaker B: We wrap up this episode. Remember, EdTech Connect is your trusted companion on your journey to enhance education through technology. Whether you're looking to spark student engagement, refine edtech implementation strategies, or stay ahead of the curve in emerging technologies, EdTech Connect brings you the insights you need. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an inspiring and informative episode. And while you're there, please leave us a review. Your feedback fuels us to keep bringing you valuable content. For even more resources and connections, head over to edtechconnect.com your hub for edtech reviews, trends and solutions. Until next time, thanks for tuning.