At The Nature Conservancy, a four-person centralized email team supports publishing needs for more than 100 business units across the organization. As communication needs expanded over time, the email ecosystem grew into a collection of 13 separate templates, many of which served similar purposes but required independent maintenance, QA, documentation, and development support.
What began as a template redesign effort quickly revealed a larger systems problem.
The challenge wasn’t simply improving email layouts. It was creating a more sustainable foundation that would allow a small team to support a growing organization efficiently while delivering a more consistent experience for subscribers.
The goal was to reduce operational complexity, improve the subscriber experience, and establish a scalable system that could evolve without creating additional maintenance burden.
Every email request across the organization flows through a centralized team consisting of:
Together, this team supports email publishing for more than 100 business units.
Over time, the email ecosystem expanded to 13 separate templates. While each template was created to solve a specific need, many introduced overlapping functionality that increased complexity without providing meaningful differentiation.
This created challenges on two fronts.
The core question became: how might we create a flexible system that supports a diverse range of communication needs without continuously expanding the number of templates required to maintain it?
Senior UX Designer
I led the UX strategy and design effort for the initiative.
Rather than approaching the work as a traditional template redesign, I focused on understanding the ecosystem as a system. My responsibility was to identify consolidation opportunities, translate user and business insights into design principles, and create a scalable architecture that could support multiple communication types through a shared set of components.
Responsibilities included:
The goal was to reduce operational complexity without sacrificing flexibility for content authors across the organization.
Before exploring design solutions, I reviewed historical engagement data to understand how subscribers interacted with existing email experiences.
Several findings stood out:
These findings challenged several assumptions about how subscribers were using our emails and helped identify opportunities to improve content hierarchy and navigation patterns.
I also conducted research into CTA structures and engagement patterns.
One recurring theme emerged: users are more likely to take action when value is clearly communicated before the CTA rather than relying on a button alone to drive engagement.
This insight led to a redesign of our CTA approach, shifting focus away from decorative containers and toward providing meaningful context before asking users to act.
I evaluated common interaction patterns across email experiences and established standards for clickable areas throughout the system.
Key decisions included:
These interaction patterns later became foundational rules within the component system.
The redesign was guided by three strategic principles.
Every additional template created future maintenance costs. Rather than redesigning every template independently, I evaluated whether each variation solved a genuinely unique business need or if it could be supported through more flexible patterns.
This shifted the conversation from “How do we improve 13 templates?” to “How do we maintain fewer systems while supporting the same needs?”
Instead of designing isolated templates, I created a component-driven architecture built around reusable modules.
Examples included:
This approach created greater consistency while allowing future communication needs to be supported through configuration rather than additional template creation.
Accessibility, responsiveness, and consistency were treated as foundational requirements rather than post-launch enhancements.
Every component was designed with:
The objective was to create a system capable of scaling over time without requiring major redesign efforts in the future.
The final solution was a consolidated email ecosystem built around reusable components and standardized patterns. Rather than maintaining a growing collection of specialized templates, the new system allows multiple communication types to share a common foundation while preserving flexibility where it matters most.
Before: 13 templates. After: 9 templates.
Key changes included:
The result was a significantly simpler ecosystem that remained flexible enough to support diverse communication needs across the organization.
The new system introduced a shared component library used across:
Instead of designing for individual emails, the focus shifted to designing for the system itself.
This project reinforced an idea that has shaped much of my work as a designer: sometimes the most impactful design work isn’t a new feature or interface. It’s the creation of systems that allow organizations to operate more effectively over time.
What started as a template redesign ultimately became an exercise in systems thinking. By focusing on scalability, operational efficiency, and shared foundations, we created a solution that benefits both the people producing email campaigns and the people receiving them.