Technical and Brand Overhaul

Organized in 1956 as players were struggling to get basic necessities like clean uniforms and safe equipment, the NFLPA is now a full-service union. The PA represents active and former players’ interests in everything from wage agreements to marketing royalties. And while the average player’s active career is only 3.5 years long, they are touched in a myriad of ways by the union from their early 20s onward, and often throughout the rest of their lives.

Our research began by asking a series of fundamental questions about what the PA means to players and what they expect from its website. We conducted dozens of interviews with active players, former players, agents, financial advisors, marketing reps, and PA stakeholders. We then used this information to build out a comprehensive NFL Player Career Journey Map and to identify the organization’s key communication challenges and opportunities.

A key insight that came out of our research was that PA audiences often want very different things. Agents want no-frills access to contracts; players want easy-to-find answers to complicated questions; marketing reps want to attract sponsors; and PA leadership wants to bolster credibility with each stakeholder group. We needed to balance the needs of these distinct audiences within a holistic information architecture, tailoring each experience directly to our users’ needs.

The PA does so much for players that just learning about it all can feel like work. We realized leveraging personalization — surfacing customized content after a user logs into the site — could be a smart way to show players content they didn't yet know they needed. We decided to create a dashboard that would serve as the starting screen for users after they log in, providing personalized, up-to-date information and relevant action items.

To realize this level of personalization we needed to surface data from the PA’s CRM. We consulted on potential solutions with the PA’s technical team who ultimately decided on creating an API for communication between the site and the CRM. We helped define their team’s API implementation and then integrated it into the site; we also developed customizable “automation recipes” that can be scheduled to trigger specific types of personalization.

As a foundation for communication on the public side of the site, we developed a creative strategy called “Get Open.” Get Open is a metaphor for getting ahead as a professional athlete, but it’s also about getting real. It’s about players showcasing their lives beyond the uniforms and speaking truth about how the game needs to improve. It encourages players to take what football has to offer, while also seizing opportunities available beyond the stadium.

When it came to content strategy, we wanted to promote both content findability and organizational identity. While active players were a key audience, many rookies didn’t even realize they were part of a union; we needed to optimize for attracting and retaining players, while also aiding discoverability. Lastly, we needed to keep content brief and scannable for an audience on mobile devices who would be itching to get back to Instagram.

FAQs are sometimes just a way to dump a ton of content onto a single page instead of structuring it intentionally to promote better understanding. In this case, we learned from PA staff that there are literally dozens of frequently asked questions they are fielding repeatedly. To make the site more effective at answering those questions directly, we decided to break FAQs into reusable modules that can be presented when, where, and to whom they are the most relevant.

Craft CMS is a robust content management system out-of-the-box but also provides a framework to easily extend its capabilities. This meant while Craft handled the content, we could focus on building the site’s custom functionality — integration with the PA’s user data and SSO, personalization recipes, integration with Azure Blob Storage, and automated testing of our custom code. Craft multi-site will also let us add additional sites to the install in the future.

Even after launch, we worked with the NFLPA to help make the site a central hub for diverse audiences, especially in clutch moments. The 2024 NFL Player Team Report Card experience was exactly that; shining a needed spotlight on players' working conditions and garnering widespread media attention. The interactive report cards put our infrastructure to the test with a massive spike in traffic: in just a 24-hour period, the page easily withstood 10.8 million requests with a peak of 140k+ a minute. Outside of enabling the NFLPA website to handle an impressive surge in traffic, our improvements made it easier for their team to configure infrastructure settings and create new dynamic page experiences moving forward.