What a transit planners' council learned migrating to SSO first

A year before NANA's member portal moved to single sign-on, the Council of Municipal Transit Planners had already been through it. CMTP's 3,300 members log into a smaller system than NANA's, but Director of Technology Ravi Deshpande-Cole ran into the same kind of account-matching problems NANA's portal team hit in June — just at a smaller, quieter scale.

CMTP moved its own member system to single sign-on in 2025, consolidating logins for its 3,300 members and 14 staff. Deshpande-Cole said the council's small size meant a bad migration would have been noticed immediately, so his team staged the rollout by region rather than launching to every member at once.

"We migrated the Seattle-area members first because that's where most of my support calls come from anyway," he said. "If something broke, I wanted it to break in front of people I could walk over and talk to."

That staged approach surfaced the same problem Renée Okafor's team found at NANA a year later: members whose email address had changed, or who belonged to more than one account, didn't map cleanly onto a single new identity. CMTP's smaller rollout meant the fix took days rather than the two weeks NANA's lockouts ran.

Okafor and Deshpande-Cole compared notes after NANA's portal relaunch produced its own account-matching lockouts in June. Both said the lesson generalizes past software: any association replacing multiple login systems with one should assume some fraction of its membership records don't match cleanly, no matter how clean the data looks in a spreadsheet.

CMTP's technology staff is fourteen people; NANA's is smaller still. Deshpande-Cole said the size difference matters less than it seems, because the account-matching problem scales with how long an organization has existed, not how many staff run its systems. "We'd been collecting member data in one form or another since long before I had this job," he said. "Every renewal cycle, every address change, every merger between two smaller transit agencies — all of it eventually has to get reconciled into one clean identity, and none of it was designed with that reconciliation in mind."

Deshpande-Cole's advice for other member-based associations weighing a similar move:

• Migrate a subset of members first, even if it feels slower

• Build the account-matching logic to run automatically, not as a manual support fallback

• Expect the mismatches to cluster among members who belong to more than one chapter or region

• Tell members in advance that a first login after migration might require an extra verification step

NANA is applying that same staged approach to its next portal release, piloting a mobile version with the Pacific Northwest chapter before expanding it. The SSO Migration Lessons Brief draws on both organizations' experience.

Deshpande-Cole said he agreed to share CMTP's experience publicly, rather than treat it as an internal lesson learned, because most member-based associations only go through a login-system migration once every several years, which means there's rarely anyone on staff who has done it before. "We all end up learning the same lesson independently, a year or two apart, because nobody wrote it down the first time," he said. CMTP's own migration notes, originally an internal document for its board, became the starting point for the joint brief with Okafor's team.

He added that the technology gap between a 14-person transit-planning council and a 38-person national society matters less for this kind of project than people assume. Both organizations were replacing the same basic thing: a set of separate logins built up over years, with no single owner responsible for keeping them consistent. "The size of your staff tells you how fast you can fix a problem once you find it," Deshpande-Cole said. "It doesn't tell you whether you'll have the problem in the first place."