AMPP: A shared foundation for membership and programs

A conference deadline and a longer horizon

AMPP serves physicians trained in both internal medicine and pediatrics. When I began working with the association in April 2023, its leadership was preparing for an upcoming conference and considering how a new professional network could help members find one another, participate in programs, and remain involved at different stages of their careers.

I led requirements and UX discovery through meetings, email, demonstrations, and conversations with physicians at different career stages. Recent graduates described needs around compensation, finances, career direction, self-advocacy, and mentorship. Experienced physicians were looking for leadership development, while senior physicians wanted structured ways to mentor and contribute. I synthesized what I heard into requirements, reviewed the priorities with AMPP leadership, and used the result to shape the site’s information architecture, membership model, member and staff workflows, and program foundation.

Working toward the conference deadline, I designed and delivered the first release: the public website and identity, registration, physician validation, a member directory, email infrastructure, and conference registration. Approximately 350 physicians registered around the initial launch. Roughly 20 encountered account-creation problems, primarily involving password emails during the registration surge.

I designed the launch as a foundation for later programs, so AMPP would not need a separate member list, identity check, application process, and administrative workflow each time it introduced one.

One member record across developing programs

As those programs took shape, I extended the launch foundation into a modular platform rather than a set of disconnected applications. I designed and built AMPP Core around a shared MemberPress member record. The layer identifies logged-in members, retrieves and prefills stored information, links program activity to each member, and provides common identity, access, and communication functions.

I connected the member and mentor directories, events calendar, classifieds and business directories, webinar archive, and program-specific administrative interfaces to this shared layer. New functions can reuse the same identity and access logic without adding lists for staff to reconcile.

I integrated NPI registry checks into registration and designed the exception workflow. Approved records do not require repeated validation; duplicate or incomplete registrations are flagged for staff review. The latest project record lists approximately 400 automatic validations, with few exceptions requiring manual review.

The platform also connects with Mailchimp and Discourse for communications and private community groups. Because a public-facing action can appear complete even when an external service fails, I built connection-health and debugging views that expose integration and email-delivery problems to administrators.

Supporting mentorship with staff review

I designed and built the member-facing mentorship workflow on the shared member record. It prefills stored member information, then collects career stage, practice setting, interests, goals, mentoring domains, current challenges, and preferences. In the final member-facing step, a mentee selects three to five preferred mentors.

For staff, I built a backend that brings those selections together with the application context. It uses structured criteria and a separate review of free-text themes to recommend possible pairs for staff consideration. Staff confirm each pairing and communicate with participants.

After staff confirm and record a pairing, the follow-up workflow I built supports introductions, communication, later surveys, renewal or closure, and relationship history. The latest project record includes approximately 15 applications, approximately 15 mentors, and 13 staff-recorded pairings.

What the platform supports today

Four staff members use the administrative systems I designed and built to manage records, applications, pairings, events, webinars, listings, and communications. I documented the major workflows, trained staff, tested realistic scenarios with dedicated accounts, and continue to revise the system in response to staff and member feedback.

I make most post-launch changes by extending the existing structure rather than introducing parallel workflows. When AMPP needed listings to support multiple terms, for example, I revised the publishing workflow so the selected term carries into the resulting record instead of being managed separately.

The latest project record lists 1,084 members and approximately 400 automatically validated records. After AMPP decided to introduce paid membership in January 2026, I extended the shared member architecture to support subscriptions and renewal management.