City Parks Alliance

Here’s how Mightybytes helped City Parks Alliance (CPA) transform unreliable website and membership infrastructure into a resilient solution that improves both organizational initiatives and internal workflows.

Mightybytes began working with City Parks Alliance (CPA) in Fall 2023 at a moment of transition and potential risk for the organization.

At the time, CPA was operating three separate websites:

1. The main City Parks Alliance website
2. Greater & Greener, a website for their biennial city parks conference
3. Mayors for Parks, a bipartisan coalition advocating at the federal level to increase investment in urban parks

The organization faced several interconnected challenges in managing these websites:

• Maintaining three sites was time-consuming and unsustainable with existing infrastructure and resources.
• Information was difficult for people to locate across platforms.
• A fragmented three-site digital presence created brand inconsistency and obscured the relationship between CPA and its initiatives.
• Core site functionality was failing due to accumulated technical debt, including outdated plugins and deprecated third-party integrations.

At a structural level, years of content updates and temporary fixes resulted in a fragile and unreliable system that frustrated stakeholders and undermined long-term sustainability.

At the same time, City Parks Alliance faced several systemic issues that required immediate attention.

• The Greater & Greener conference was approaching, following a previous conference year marked by significant technology-related registration and schedule management issues.
• The conference site relied on a legacy WordPress implementation using a soon-to-be-deprecated third-party SOAP API.
• The current website hosting partner was significantly overcharging them each month.

CPA needed a flexible partner to rapidly assume technical support responsibilities as they approached the end of their engagement with a previous vendor. From the early moments of our relationship, Mightybytes focused on triage, stabilizing what existed as much as possible while researching longer-term solutions.

We began by taking over maintenance of CPA’s websites and addressing immediate, mission-critical issues. We also worked to increase reliability and reduce complexity where possible within constraints of the legacy architecture. 

We also supported the Greater & Greener 2024 site, working within its inherent technical limitations while helping CPA understand the root causes of recurring issues.

Unfortunately, not all problems could be fully resolved without a rebuild. Plus, the site couldn’t be migrated to a new web host in its current state.

However, we improved reliability and provided consistency within existing platforms so they could manage memberships and host a successful conference. Plus, we worked with their existing web host to significantly reduce monthly costs.

In parallel with triage efforts, we started long-term planning and strategy, completing a product roadmapping process, aligning on project goals, and building consensus on the desired feature set to best support CPA’s members.

After discovery, we walked away with a roadmap that outlined their goals:

1. Bring Greater & Greener and Mayors for Parks sites under the main association website.
2. Migrate the website to new hosting as part of the redesign process.
3. Create a simpler, more reliable membership verification process for gated content.
4. Refine the main navigation, utilizing tree testing for validation.
5. Rebuild Greater & Greener conference content, leveraging a third-party API to automate as much of the process as possible. 

Despite some unanticipated setbacks, we launched the new City Parks Alliance website in early January 2026.

The new site accomplished many of CPA’s feature requests, including:

• Simple member access to gated content and exclusive events validated through a Single Sign-On (SSO) process.
• Enable site visitors to preview gated content.
• We consolidated three distinct CPA sites into a single site reducing content-management complexity and establishing a shared design language across initiatives.
• Updated layouts with tooltips for conference price tiers and membership benefits.
• Also, moving the Cvent API from SOAP to REST allowed us to auto-sync between the website and conference platform so admins no longer need to edit content in two different places.
• An improved conference schedule page that includes:
  • Ability to add sessions to a list of favorites that can be shared or printed,
  • Scheduling features like session overlap, and so on,
  • Responsive design to work across devices and platforms.

Finally, as with all our projects, the website was also delivered adhering to W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines specifications at Level AA.

Post-launch, we’re working with the City Parks Alliance team to support Greater & Greener, improve analytics and reporting, and continue optimizing the site for search engines, AI Overviews, and so on.

This was a big project with many stakeholders from multiple organizations. It took many months to complete and included several unanticipated timing setbacks.

However, it’s also a testament to the power of trust, good collaboration, and clear communication in the service of a shared long-term goal. City Parks Alliance now has a robust set of tools to help them more effectively manage member needs and support organizational growth.

We look forward to continue helping them build long-term success.