NANA issues RFP for a new member portal

NANA issued a request for proposals this month for a new member portal, opening a vendor search that Director of Digital Renée Okafor says is built around what members have actually asked for, not a wish list assembled internally.

Okafor's team spent the second half of 2024 collecting complaints and requests from chapter leaders, committee volunteers, and staff across all six chapters. Three requests came up consistently enough to anchor the RFP:

• A single sign-on. Members currently hold separate logins for the events system, the learning catalog, and the resource library — three passwords for one membership.

• One resource library. Research reports, toolkits, and guides live in different systems depending on when they were published, with no unified search.

• Chapter directories. Members have no reliable way to find who else belongs to their own chapter, beyond the chapter's own mailing list.

The RFP went to a shortlist of vendors already serving association management systems for organizations NANA's size or larger, rather than an open public posting, on the theory that a portal this central to daily membership operations needs a vendor who has done comparable migrations before.

Proposals are due in the coming weeks, with evaluation to follow through the spring. Okafor's team will score submissions against the three priorities above, plus implementation timeline, data-migration plan, and ongoing support terms. No vendor has been selected, and Okafor said the team does not intend to announce finalists publicly before a decision is made.

The portal project sits with NANA's digital team but touches every department: chapter relations, membership, events, and the resource library all depend on the same underlying member record. Okafor said the RFP process was deliberately slower than some staff wanted, in order to get input from chapter leaders before specifications were locked rather than after.

Members with questions about the RFP timeline can direct them to the digital team through the existing member portal. NANA expects to announce a selected vendor once contract terms are finalized.

Any vendor NANA selects will need to migrate member records for the organization's full membership base, spanning six chapters, alongside years of accumulated resource-library content and event-registration history. Okafor's team has flagged data migration as the single largest risk in the project, ahead of vendor selection itself, because a portal that loses or scrambles chapter affiliations on launch day would be worse than the current three-login system it replaces.

The digital team has not set a public launch date. Okafor said internally that the team is working toward a build window later this year, with the specific timeline to depend on which vendor is selected and how much custom integration work the winning proposal requires. A single sign-on rollout of this size has not been attempted at NANA before, and the migration plan itself will be one of the criteria the team scores in each vendor's proposal.