NYC Bird Alliance
NYC Bird Alliance (formerly NYC Audubon) is a grassroots conservation nonprofit protecting wild birds and habitats across New York City's five boroughs for over 45 years. JetRockets built the organization's website on Ruby on Rails and Spina CMS in 2020 and continues to maintain and modernize the platform — which carried the organization through its 2024 rebrand and today powers 300+ annual programs, conservation research, and donor engagement.
Challenge
NYC Bird Alliance — then operating as NYC Audubon — is one of New York City's most established conservation nonprofits, with more than 45 years of research, advocacy, and community programming behind it. In 2020, its digital presence needed to catch up with the scale of its work.
The organization needed a website that could:
- Present a large, layered body of content — conservation programs, research publications, advocacy campaigns, and educational resources — in a way visitors could actually navigate
- Promote 300+ annual outings, lectures, classes, and community science events across all five boroughs
- Drive the memberships and donations a nonprofit depends on
- Let a small, non-technical staff publish and restructure content on their own, without waiting on developers
Solution
JetRockets built the site on Ruby on Rails with Spina CMS — an open-source, Rails-native content management system. That combination gave the organization a fully custom front end with the editorial freedom of a CMS: staff manage pages, navigation, imagery, and publications themselves, while the Rails foundation keeps the platform fast, secure, and easy to extend.
Events & Programs Hub
The Events & Birding section organizes the organization's 300+ annual programs — bird outings, festivals, lectures, accessible and bilingual birding, and volunteer opportunities — into a browsable structure that staff maintain entirely through the CMS.
A Home for Conservation Science
Dedicated program hubs present decades of conservation work — Project Safe Flight, Birds of NY Harbor, habitat protection, community science surveys — alongside downloadable research publications, giving the organization's science a public, citable home.
Built to Support Fundraising
Donation, membership, and legacy-giving pathways are woven throughout the site, with persistent calls to action and a dedicated Support Birds section — the digital backbone of the nonprofit's fundraising. Mailchimp integration keeps supporters connected through newsletters and campaign updates.
From NYC Audubon to NYC Bird Alliance
In June 2024, the organization adopted a new name and visual identity, becoming NYC Bird Alliance. Because the site's content, navigation, and branding live in the CMS rather than hard-coded templates, the platform absorbed the rebrand — new name, new identity, new domain — without a rebuild.
Keeping the Platform Modern
JetRockets recently completed a full upgrade of the platform — bringing Ruby, Rails, Spina CMS, and the surrounding dependency stack up to current versions. The upgrade keeps the site secure, performant, and ready for continued development, without disrupting the content and workflows staff have built up over five years.
Results
- Six years in production — the platform has served the organization continuously since 2020
- Staff publish and restructure content independently through Spina CMS, with no developer involvement in day-to-day operations
- 300+ annual programs and events promoted through a structure the team maintains themselves
- A full organizational rebrand executed on the existing platform, with no rebuild required
- An up-to-date Rails and Spina stack after the recent modernization, positioned for years of continued use
JetRockets continues to support NYC Bird Alliance as its long-term development partner — proof that a well-built Rails platform can carry a nonprofit through growth, change, and even a new name.
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