AAGLA. The design and engineering partner behind 10,000 members of advocacy work.
The Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles serves 10,000+ rental housing providers across Southern California. AAGLA owns the brand and runs their own communications team. SD is the design and engineering partner: new pages on both their public site and Novi member portal, custom tools their member operations need, and the infrastructure that runs all of it.
A working site that couldn’t keep up with the work.
AAGLA’s communications team owns the brand and the message. What they didn’t have, year over year, was the design and engineering capacity to keep extending it: new program pages, custom member tools, document management workflows, member intelligence dashboards. That’s where SD comes in.
We work inside AAGLA’s existing visual system. No rebrand, no foundational rewrites. We design new pages on top of what they have, build the custom pieces their team needs, and operate the infrastructure underneath so their comms team can ship without thinking about hosting, security, or platform plumbing.
The work splits cleanly into a build phase and a run phase. The build is what most agencies talk about. The run is what we built our studio around. Year 6 of the engagement, no end date scheduled.
Three workstreams. Inside AAGLA’s existing brand system.
New pages and UI on both the public WordPress site (homepage included) and the Novi AMS member portal, designed and built within AAGLA’s existing visual system. The brand and tone come from AAGLA’s comms team. The execution comes from us.
Custom WordPress plugin built specifically for AAGLA: a form-driven document management system that organizes the legal forms, leases, and member documents AAGLA distributes. Includes migration of legacy documents into the new system.
A standalone dashboard SD built and owns, currently in proof of concept with AAGLA as the founding tenant. Pulls member, activity, and engagement data out of Novi and surfaces signals that matter for member ops: upcoming renewal forecasts, churn risk, certification seekers, positive renewal intent. The platform is multi-tenant by design; the AAGLA pilot is informing what gets shipped as a productized offering next.
The redesign ends. The retainer doesn’t.
Year 10 SD is the operating layer that keeps the work alive. AAGLA doesn’t maintain a web team. They don’t need to.
// status: active retainer · Year 6 of engagement · no end date scheduled
What AAGLA’s members say about AAGLA.
Our job: extend that experience to the digital surface. The trust members place in AAGLA’s advocacy work has to carry through to every page they land on and every form they fill out.
I have been a member since 1987. Their magazine keeps us informed of changes in the law and areas the city is looking at. Their forms are a great service. Appreciate their action committees in fighting for our rights!James D. / AAGLA Member Since 1987