PCAPPA
A hub for a growing professional community
Serving facilities professionals at educational institutions across the U.S. and Canadian Pacific Coast, with training, webinars, and an annual conference.
The homepage leads with concrete benefits (training, career development, webinars, networking) and pairs it with a live events calendar and email signup so visitors can act immediately
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An easy-to-scan grid of programs, such as professional development, scholarships, mentoring, business resources, turns “what does membership get me” into an instant answer, backed by real member testimonials and sponsor logos
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Every board position is laid out with its own term length, responsibilities, and application process — the kind of detailed self-service page that reduces officer turnover headaches and email back-and-forth for an all-volunteer board
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“PureLynx didn’t just redesign our website — they helped us think differently about what our website could be. They took the time to understand our organization first, and built the product we needed, not just the one we thought we wanted. They’ve been a strategic partner to PCAPPA, not just a web designer.”
About PCAPPA
Where facilities professionals connect and grow
PCAPPA is the Pacific Coast Region of APPA, serving facilities professionals at educational institutions across the U.S. and Canadian Pacific Coast.
Their goals for the website were ambitious. They wanted:
A reliable repository of information for current members — events, photos of past conferences, board roles, award nomination criteria and deadlines, bylaws, subchapters — so members and the board itself weren’t left constantly answering the same questions by email
A clear case for why someone should join PCAPPA in the first place
A way to show facilities management as a desirable career to young people entering the field
Increase attendance at the annual conference and increase participation in programs like credentialing and mentoring, and writing for PCAPPA’s publications
Challenge
Lots of information, hard to find, hard to keep current
The website needed to serve multiple audiences with varying needs
Needed a way to organize large amounts of scattered information so it could be found easily by the different target audiences, without duplicate or contradictory information.
The website needed to be more engaging. Images were impersonal campus photos instead of people, there were no testimonials, and specific benefits were buried.
The organization runs on an all-volunteer board — around a dozen positions, from President down to committee chairs that turn over annually, meaning the people responsible for the website’s content are rarely the same from year to year. This made it difficult for board members to keep track of where information lived and keep it up-to-date and accurate.
Process
First, understanding the audience
PureLynx started by studying PCAPPA itself — its goals, its distinct audiences, and what each of its target audiences needed from the site. Prospective members, existing members, business partners, emerging professionals: each got their own analysis as to what information they needed and what would get them interested and engaged.
From there, PureLynx walked the board through the thinking as it developed, rather than proceeding straight to a visual design. The board had always known its priorities were many and its audiences were different, but hadn’t seen it laid out clearly enough, in one place, to actually prioritize. Once the trade-offs were visible instead of implied, the board could agree on what was needed.
“They created diagrams that laid out our different target markets and what message would resonate with each one. It wasn’t about font colors — it was strategy, engagement, and how our website could actually deliver value.”
— Dr. Ayodele Akinola
That same audience map determined how the site is organized today. Where the old site funneled everyone through single catch-all pages, the new navigation splits into direct destinations everywhere it matters — About leads straight to Board of Directors or Regional Chapters, Programs leads straight to Scholarships or DEI or Best Practices, and Get Involved offers five distinct paths instead of one generic contact link. Someone looking for a specific thing finds it in one click, not a search.
Immediate engagement
Quickly catch the interest of multiple audiences
The top of the homepage runs a slideshow on the left and a steady grid on the right, each doing its own job from the audience map. The grid — training, career development, webinars, networking — stays fixed and speaks specifically to prospective members: the benefits they’d get by joining, visible no matter which slide is showing.
The slideshow rotates through the other audiences in order, so a visitor sees something aimed at them within seconds instead of deciding the site isn’t relevant and leaving. It opens with top-level orientation for any visitor — what site you’ve landed on, who these people are — then moves to existing members: conference details meant to inform them and drive attendance. Later slides shift to recruiting young people into the profession. Each slide is built for the specific audience the diagram identified, running the same priorities PureLynx and the board worked out together.
Evidence
Specific details that answer “will I benefit from this?”
Training, career development, webinars, networking — the homepage now states plainly what membership actually delivers, instead of leaving a visitor to infer it from a mission statement. A live events calendar backs that up with specifics: a visitor doesn’t have to take PCAPPA’s word that it’s an active organization, or wait for an email to find out — they can see the actual upcoming events right there. Member testimonials sit in their own recognizable block further down the page, with a format which will catch the eye of anyone who wants to hear from real members.
Navigation
Multiple logical paths instead of inconsistent menus and single points of access
Where the old site funneled everyone through single pages — one “About,” one “Programs” — the new navigation splits into direct destinations everywhere it matters. About leads straight to Board of Directors or Regional Chapters. Programs leads straight to Scholarships, DEI, or Best Practices. Get Involved offers five distinct paths — write for us, nominate someone for an award, join the board, become a mentor, apply for a scholarship — instead of one generic contact link standing in for all of them.
Board of Directors
Board roles, explained in one place before someone decides to apply
The old board duties lived in a hard-to-find PDF with tiny text, one more document to track down and squint through. Now every position — Awards & Recognition Chair, Business Partner Liaison, President, Treasurer, and a dozen more — is its own expandable entry with its own responsibilities, laid out on one page instead of buried in a file. Top-level info like which positions are open and how to apply are right at the top.
That same fix — one place for the facts, repeated invitations pointing back to it — solves a problem the old site had: conflicting information, like a board deadline that differed depending on which page you landed on. Now board terms, deadlines, and how to apply live in one place, with the invitation to join repeated wherever someone might be looking — the board directory, the About menu, Get Involved — but always pointing back to the same current, accurate source.
The board directory — photos and bios of current directors — does its own separate work: alongside each director sits a direct nudge to consider running yourself, planting the idea at the exact moment someone’s looking at who currently holds the seats.
Ongoing partnership
The board decides. PureLynx follows through.
PCAPPA’s board members are volunteers with full-time jobs at their own universities, and many sit on multiple boards beyond PCAPPA’s. They don’t have time to learn a website’s history, and they shouldn’t have to. Their job is the high-level decision — which award to offer and its deadline, when and where the conference is held and its theme, which programs PCAPPA runs and what they do, which webinars to offer — not the follow-through of publicizing it, formatting it, and later handling what happens once it’s over.
PureLynx handles that whole lifecycle. A board member decides on a call for award nominations; PureLynx posts it, and removes it once the deadline passes, so the site doesn’t quietly accumulate expired announcements the way the old one did. A board member picks a webinar topic; PureLynx publicizes it beforehand, then uploads the recording afterward so members can watch it retroactively. The same goes for everything else that keeps the site current — events on the calendar, news and blog updates, member spotlights, the sponsor logo array, a new president’s message each time the presidency changes hands. The board decides what PCAPPA wants to say. PureLynx makes sure it says it, correctly, at the right time, and follows through once it’s over.
“It’s a huge time-saver having changes made through PureLynx. Our people already sit on the boards of multiple organizations — we don’t have the bandwidth to also be the ones maintaining a website. And if we tried to do it ourselves, mistakes would happen. It’s just not our profession. PureLynx has become our repository of institutional memory, since our board changes every year.”
— Dr. Ayodele Akinola
The relationship also extended to PCAPPA’s LinkedIn presence, giving the association a consistent voice everywhere members actually look.
Six years in