PIF Coalition 2025

Designing for efficiency and engagement in a complex member platform

Protecting Immigrant Families (PIF) Coalition is a national coalition that provides trusted resources and coordinates advocacy to support immigrants and their families. PIF needed a digital platform that could serve their diverse coalition, communicate impact to funders, and support frequent updates by time-constrained staff.

I led the end-to-end redesign of PIF’s website and the development of a new member-only platform, owning discovery through handoff and QA. As both product designer and project lead, I set strategy and managed execution across a four-person team. Our work focused on improving resource discoverability, increasing coalition member engagement, enabling usage tracking and reducing operational load for PIF’s internal teams.

Challenge

PIF Coalition’s digital platform needed to serve a diverse set of users, including current and prospective coalition members, internal staff and content creators, funders and the general public. Though PIF Coalition had a basic existing website, bloated IA and outdated UI made the site effectively unusable and a full re-envisioning of PIF’s online offerings were required for this project.

After initial discovery, it became clear that the new design would have to:

Make it easy for new and existing coalition members to get involved in PIF’s work and utilize their many resources, without requiring unnecessary support from PIF’s time-strapped staff.
Create scalable IA and internal content creation systems that allowed for rapid growth of resources while protecting site usability
Clearly communicate who PIF is and what they offer to a range of key audiences
Limit certain content to members-only both to communicate the value of membership as well as provide necessary protections due to the current political climate around immigration
Allow PIF to collect nuanced engagement metrics on resource usage to inform strategy as well as for impact reporting

Solution

We created an inviting and intuitive platform that balances public access with member-only spaces, making it easy for a range of audiences to engage with PIF Coalition’s impactful work.

Here are a few highlights from the new experience:

A brand refresh that includes new fonts, color palettes and decorative elements that emphasizes trust, dynamic action and accessibility, that build off of PIF’s existing three core colors.

Intuitive information architecture that aligns with how PIF’s various audiences actually seek out information.

A resource library that provides an easily browsable home for all of the coalition’s resources, including the option for PIF to spotlight resources to increase engagement.

Individual resource pages with the ability to preview all resource types (google docs, slides, PDFs, videos and images). Users can easily select from available languages and actions.

I facilitated a series of workshops with PIF staff to align on a sustainable content creation system for new resources.

An intuitive application flow that breaks a long application process into simple, digestible steps.

A member-only dashboard provides onboarding for both new and existing coalition members, as well as announcements and quick links to key resources and actions.

A Working Groups page - the heart of PIF’s coalition building model - provides an overview of each group for the public, while logged-in members have access to group details as well as the ability to join a group independently without staff support.

Impact

Due to some unanticipated challenges working with PIF’s current CRM, the full website experience was just launched in mid-January 2026. However, the new site is now set up to gather baseline metrics on website usage (including engagement with resources, working groups, and member-only spaces) which will inform future direction of the organization and website.

Learnings

One of the most anticipated features we designed - a searchable, login-protected member directory - was ultimately blocked by limitations in PIF’s CRM, EveryAction. Though both PIF and our developer worked to get confirmation on the feasibility of the designs early during technical discovery, challenges communicating with the CRM’s customer support team meant the discovery phase dragged on for many months until we finally had to cut the feature.

While the directory did not ship, it was fully designed and validated with users, and PIF plans to revisit it when they migrate to a more flexible CRM, anticipated in late 2026.