The platform you are accountable for. Operated by a team that stays.

Yes. Most of our higher-ed engagements involve a partner agency that owns the brand, the design system, or the campaign creative. We implement what they design and we operate the platform that ships their work. We do not try to replace the relationship you already have with a brand or design firm. If you do not have one, we can recommend several we have worked well with.

Year one is implementation, onboarding, and stabilization. By the end of year one your platform should be measurably more reliable than when we started, and your team should have stopped being on call for things they shouldn't be. Year three is when the engagement compounds. The architecture is well-documented, the operational cadence is established, and the platform has survived at least one accreditation cycle, multiple admissions seasons, and likely a leadership change. The team you started with is the team you still work with. Most of our long-term clients are in year four or five with the original engagement manager.

Our team's knowledge of your environment does not leave when your staff does. We maintain platform documentation, architecture decisions, integration contracts, and the historical reasoning for non-obvious configurations independently of your internal team. When your web director leaves, the next one does not have to discover from scratch why a particular Cascade asset factory was configured the way it was. The institutional knowledge stays with the engagement, not with the people who happen to be there at any given moment.

Multi-campus environments are governance problems disguised as technical problems. The technical answer is multi-site CMS architecture with a shared design system and federated content models. The governance answer is a publishing workflow that allows campus autonomy on local decisions and central control on institutional standards. We design both together with your central communications team and the campus communications leads, and we operate the result. The flagship and the regionals can publish independently without breaking each other's experience or violating institutional brand standards.

Faculty senate involvement in academic department web changes is a real constraint at most universities. We have been in projects where a proposed change to academic department template structure required faculty senate review, and where the timeline for that review was longer than the timeline for the change itself. The way we navigate it is by treating the faculty senate as a stakeholder we plan around, not an obstacle we route around. We surface decisions that require faculty input early, we provide the documentation that the senate review needs, and we structure the work in phases that do not stall when the senate calendar slows everything down.

Every integration that connects the CMS to the SIS or the CRM has to be re-evaluated when one of those systems changes. A migration from Banner to Workday Student, a CRM swap from Salesforce to TargetX, an SSO change. Each one breaks integrations that were built against the previous system's API contracts. The way we handle this is by treating the integration layer as its own deliverable with versioned contracts and abstraction layers. When the underlying system changes, we modify the integration layer rather than rebuilding the integration from scratch. It does not eliminate the work, but it limits the blast radius and the timeline.

Transitions from an existing vendor are part of most of our engagements. We start with a Platform Assessment to document the current state of your infrastructure, your CMS configuration, your integration contracts, and your operational gaps. We identify what we will keep, what we will rebuild, and what we will deprecate. We plan the cutover with your team and with the outgoing vendor where they are willing to cooperate. The most common outcome is a 90-day transition where we run in parallel with the outgoing arrangement before taking over fully. Your platform does not go down during the handoff.

Yes. We maintain a current HECVAT and we provide it at any stage of your procurement process. Most institutions request it during late evaluation or at the start of contracting. We can provide it earlier if your information security officer wants to review before the engagement scope is finalized. The HECVAT covers our security posture for the workloads we operate on AWS and Azure, our data handling practices, and our compliance with the controls higher-ed institutions typically require.