Portal sign-in lockouts fixed; mobile pilot next

The single sign-on system NANA rolled out to all six chapters at once on June 5 locked out roughly 9% of member logins in its first two weeks. Director of Digital Renée Okafor said the fix has been live since July 10, and the team is changing how the next release goes out.

The new portal replaced six separate chapter login systems with one identity provider. Most accounts moved over without incident. But a subset of members who belonged to more than one chapter, or whose email address had changed since their last renewal, hit a mismatch between their old account and the new single sign-on record. The result was a login error with no clear next step.

About 9% of logins failed in the first two weeks after launch, concentrated in the first four days. Membership Engagement Manager Declan Moorfield's team fielded the calls; most were resolved by manually merging the member's old and new records. Okafor said the team had load-tested the new system before launch but had not tested the account-matching logic against the full range of ways a member's information can drift over a decade of renewals.

By July 10, the engineering team had shipped a fix that runs the same matching logic the support team had been doing by hand, catching mismatches automatically before a member ever sees an error. New lockouts have not recurred since.

Okafor was blunt about the lesson: "Pilot the SSO migration with one chapter first."

That is the approach for the portal's next release, a mobile version of the member and chapter directories. Rather than launching to all six chapters simultaneously, NANA will pilot the mobile release with the Pacific Northwest chapter starting in March 2027, watching for the same kind of account-matching problems on a smaller group before expanding.

Pacific Northwest chapter chair Grace Lindqvist said the chapter volunteered in part because its membership skews toward staff who work across more than one organization — the same profile that produced most of the June lockouts. "If the mobile release is going to break on anyone, it's going to break on us first, and I'd rather that happen in March with six weeks of runway than in the middle of Summit registration," Lindqvist said.

Okafor said the support-call volume during the lockout period also revealed a smaller, unrelated gap: several members did not know who to contact when the portal itself was the problem, rather than their own password. The team has since added a direct sign-in help line to the portal's error page, separate from the general membership inbox, so a locked-out member does not have to guess which department can help.

Okafor said the June relaunch had been timed to the Summit, where the redesigned portal was announced from the stage on June 5. That timeline left little room to stage the SSO rollout gradually, and in hindsight, she said, is the root cause of the lockouts rather than any single coding error. "We had a hard date because of the Summit announcement, and a hard date is exactly the condition under which you should not migrate every chapter at once," she said. The mobile release carries no such external deadline, which is part of why NANA can afford to pilot it with one chapter before expanding.

• Portal relaunch: June 5, 2026, to all six chapters at once

• Lockout rate: about 9% of logins in the first two weeks

• Fix shipped: July 10, 2026

• Next release: mobile directories, piloted with Pacific Northwest starting March 2027

Members who still have trouble signing in should contact their chapter office rather than resetting their password more than once, which can create a new mismatch. The membership team can also merge duplicate accounts on request.