The front door of a national member portal, rebuilt
Confidential · Membership Platforms
The business said
- “Patch the legacy CMS login once more”
- “Replatform the whole website first”
- “Buy an identity SaaS and glue it on”
- “Keep support staff resetting passwords by hand”
- “Rebuild registration and login as a modern app over the systems already in place”
The portal did not need a replatform. It needed a new front door: registration, login, and roles rebuilt over the CMS and CRM already running the organization.
A React registration and login experience over a legacy CMS and CRM
A national membership organization ran its member portal on an aging content management system wired to a constituent CRM. The stack held years of member history and could not simply be replaced, but its front door was failing: registration was clunky, login frustrated members, and the support team spent real hours on password resets. Every fix proposal ballooned into a full replatform. The insight was that the front door could be rebuilt without moving the house.
We designed the experience first, in Figma, then built it as a modern React application: a multi-step registration flow that collects what each member type actually requires, clean login, and self-service account recovery. Role-based access control maps each member, official, and administrator to what they may see, replacing the flat permissions the old system offered.
The new front end talks to the existing estate through a REST API layer, so the CMS keeps serving content and the CRM remains the system of record for memberships. A payment gateway is integrated directly into the flow, letting members join and renew inside the same experience, with automated email notifications confirming each step.
The work was delivered in phases against a fixed statement of work, with the rebuilt registration and login shipping as the first phase and deeper portal features following on the same foundation. Members meet a modern product; the organization keeps the systems its operations depend on.
- React, designed first, front end
- multi step, registration
- role based, access
- CMS + CRM, systems kept
- in the flow, payments
