NCACPA
Reorganizing a 15,000-member association around member goals.
NCACPA’s digital experience reflected its internal departments more clearly than the needs of its members. I led research and information-architecture work to rebuild that structure around how members looked for information, support, and opportunities to participate.
- Role
- Content Strategist
- Domain
- Professional membership
- Scope
- Research, information architecture, taxonomy, content strategy
- Scale
- 15K members
Evidence and impact
IA research
57
Card-sort participants
Members helped test and reshape the proposed content structure.
Member activation
500+
Advocates mobilized
Members participated in coordinated advocacy initiatives during my tenure.
Advocacy impact
4
Legislative wins
Member participation supported four successful legislative outcomes.
Fundraising
63%
PAC donation increase
Member-focused communications contributed to increased participation and giving.
The research metric reflects the IA initiative; the remaining results reflect broader member-engagement work during my five years at NCACPA.
Thesis
The content problem wasn’t volume or quality. It was an internal structure members didn’t recognize.
The context
The website mirrored the organization chart.
NCACPA served approximately 15,000 accounting professionals through education, news, advocacy, career resources, and member communities. Its digital content had accumulated around departments, programs, and internal terminology.
Members often arrived with a goal—such as maintaining a license, finding relevant education, understanding a policy issue, or connecting with peers—but the structure required them to understand how NCACPA was organized before they could find what they needed.
Findings
What I found
- Internal categories shaped the experience
- Navigation and labels reflected departments, programs, and organizational terminology.
- Member journeys crossed boundaries
- A single goal often required content and services owned by several different teams.
- Generic access obscured relevance
- Members could reach a large amount of content, but the experience did little to prioritize what applied to them.
The decision
Organize around member goals, not departments.
The new structure needed to reflect how members understood their work and responsibilities while still giving NCACPA’s internal teams a system they could maintain.
This meant treating taxonomy, navigation, personalization, and governance as connected parts of the same content system.
Design responses
The structure needed to do three things better.
Research with members and internal teams
I combined member interviews, stakeholder interviews, content analysis, and a 57-participant card sort to understand both how members grouped information and how the organization created and maintained it.
A member-centered taxonomy and sitemap
The proposed information architecture grouped content around recognizable member goals and established a more consistent language for navigation, tagging, and content ownership.
A personalized dashboard direction
The dashboard concept brought relevant education, resources, updates, and participation opportunities into one member-centered entry point.
What changed
From departmental content to a shared member model.
The proposed architecture gave NCACPA a clearer way to connect content that had previously been separated by internal ownership.
For members, that meant fewer organizational boundaries to interpret. For internal teams, it created a shared structure for navigation, taxonomy, personalization, and future content decisions.
Beyond the IA initiative
Applying the same member-centered logic to participation.
The information-architecture initiative was one part of a broader five-year role spanning content strategy, community, communications, and advocacy.
Across that work, I used the same basic principle: start with what members needed to understand or accomplish, then make the next meaningful action easier to find and take.
Clearer context and participation pathways helped mobilize more than 500 advocates, support four legislative wins, and increase PAC donations by 63%.
Reflection
What I’d carry forward.
Information architecture is never only a navigation exercise. It reflects how an organization understands its audiences, how teams divide ownership, and which actions the experience makes easy or difficult.
This project reinforced the importance of designing a structure that works from both sides: recognizable to members and sustainable for the teams responsible for maintaining it.