We wanted to provide more details of our revised UNC CAUSE virtual format planned for this fall. In lieu of our traditional, 3-day in-person event, we will be hosting UNC CAUSE as a series of virtual events over a three-week span beginning October 6th and running until October 22nd.
We chose this format in response to what we were hearing from each of the UNC System schools, combined with the modified working realities many are facing coming into the fall semester.
Conference Dates
The conference will be live on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of each week with a consistent schedule of events.
- Week 1: October 6-8
- Week 2: October 13-15
- Week 3: October 20-22

Why this approach?
We know many of you who plan to attend will be juggling work and personal responsibilities. Instead of someone potentially missing the entire conference due to one busy work week, we decided to extend the conference window. We also don’t feel that the density of events we typically see at the in-person conference will work well in an online format.
By stretching the event over three weeks, we hope more people can participate and find time to attend sessions on topics they enjoy, while engaging in community events with peers across the system. Users will have plenty of time over the three-week conference to join in, and we specifically wanted to avoid the fatigue that can come from a dense video conference schedule.
Delivery Format and Sessions
To bring the conference online, we will use a combination of standard Zoom video meetings and Zoom Webinar sessions. After thorough discussion, this seemed the most familiar option in use across the UNC System, and we have plenty of volunteers with administration experience.
For our user-led presentation sessions, we will be keeping our traditional 45-minute session format. We will also provide full-length slots for Special Interest Group meetings, UnConference sessions for emergent topic discussion, and vendor presentation slots to help provide a full conference experience.
Registration & Schedule
As a reminder, the costs to attend the 2020 UNC CAUSE Conference are being handled at the university level this year, and nearly every UNC System school has paid thus far.
Though this year’s event is virtual we are still asking that attendees register individually! We need this information to help us focus on topics of interest and will use registration emails to share the Zoom session links. Please complete the registration process today!

Those who submitted presentation proposals will be contacted soon with further details from our proposal team, and a full schedule of events will be published shortly!
Thanks for everyone’s feedback and support through this transition, and we look forward to seeing everyone in October!